Orrie Hitt (1916-1975) wrote around 150 novels, most of them paperback originals. He started his career writing crime novels. Much of his sleaze fiction is in fact crime fiction with often a very strong noir fiction flavour. When he switched genres all he really did was to add strong dashes of sleaze to what he was already doing. It’s always a mistake to assume that the writers of sleaze fiction were untalented hacks. Many were very talented writers who went on to have illustrious careers in other genres. And even those who were never able to escape the sleaze fiction ghetto were often very fine writers. That certainly applies to Orrie Hitt. His books compare quite favourably to most of the noir fiction of the 50s and early 60s.
Della Banners is around twenty and she hasn’t had much of a life. She lives on a run-down farm just outside a small hick town. Her father Chuck is a likeable enough guy but he hates work and he’s always cooking up crooked schemes to get money without working for it. He’s not very successful at it. He has a whole bunch of finance companies pursing him. Della has had enough. She’s leaving and heading for the big city. Well, not exactly the big city. Port Benton isn’t big and it isn’t much of a city. She’ll need a job, and they’re hard to come by.
Then Jack turns up on her doorstep. Jack is a salesman for a shingling company. They have two types of salesmen. The canvassers make the initial approach and persuade people to talk to the other type of salesmen - the closers. The closers. The closers are the ones who get the customer to sign on the dotted line. Jack figures that Della would be an ideal canvasser. Della thinks it sounds like a promising way to earn a living. The Wyandot company isn’t exactly honest and it’s not exactly crooked.
Della doesn’t care. Money is money. She wants money. She knows that with her stunning looks and spectacular figure she won’t have much trouble attracting customers for the company. She turns out to be an amazingly good saleswoman.
Gaining promotion with the company proves easy. The combination of her sales skills and her bedroom skills makes sure of that. She isn’t troubled by the idea of using her body to get ahead.
She and Jack have figured out that they can make a lot of money honestly, and even more money dishonestly. Defrauding customers if profitable and defrauding the company is even more profitable. It’s just a matter of how long they can get away with it, and how long before her complicated relationship with Jack gets just too complicated.
Della is definitely a bad girl. She’s a crook and she’s no more honest in her personal relationships than she is in her business dealings. We don’t entirely lose sympathy for her however. It isn’t surprising that her upbringing has made her cynical, and has made it difficult for her to make an emotional commitment. She assumes that people will let her down, because her family always let her down, and she doesn’t see much reason to care about people. And, to be honest, her experiences with people since she left the farm would not encourage anyone to take a rosy view of human nature.
She has a nice apartment, a fancy car and expensive clothes but she’s never satisfied. Maybe more money will make her happy. She doesn’t really consider the possibility that she might be unhappy no matter how much money she has.
The book has a sleazy atmosphere and there’s plenty of sex going on but we don’t get even moderately graphic descriptions. Sleaze fiction in the 50s was like strip-tease in the 50s - it was all about the tease.
She Got What She Wanted is really pure noir fiction. It deals a good deal with sex, but then sex is one of the main drivers of the action in a very large proportion of noir fiction. As noir fiction She Got What She Wanted is excellent, with a memorable noir heroine (or at least noir protagonist since she’s hardly a heroine). Highly recommended.
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