This book is two separate novels written in 1960 and 1962 respectively. Hitt had at least 150 novels to his credit and he wrote at a furious pace, often finishing a book in just two weeks. Writers with that kind of output often fall into formulas and themes which repeat, and these two fine stories fall into the James M. Cain Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice variety.

In both stories, a strong, tall working class man forsakes a nice girl who loves him for a femme fatale who seduces him into a hideous crime. In The Cheaters, it's the wife of the man who owns the bar where the protagonist works. In Dial 'M' for Man, it's the wife of the richest man in town, who is doing everything he can to destroy the TV service business the protagonist runs.

If that's all there were to these books, I'd give this three stars at best. But these books are also a great slice-of-life look at lower class America in mid-century. This is when sex often led to unplanned pregnancies and shotgun weddings. This is when corruption was rife, an small town life could feel like living in a Petri dish. This is when half the people were barely scraping by from paycheck to paycheck, and in constant fear of losing their jobs or businesses.

These were real people and Hitt, surprisingly considering how fast he wrote, has a real feel for how they felt and thought. His plots are a bit too pat and you can see some plot details coming from far away, but it is rare to see such well crafted characters and interior dialog in noir of that age.

I doubt reading deep into the Hitt canon would be that rewarding, but these are two of his better books and they make for an enjoyable and thought provoking read. America is very different in almost every way 50 years on. This book is a great way to relive some of that time.

This is a seamy tale. Someone who has sunk so low his opportunity to operate an anteroom for hookers seems like a step up finds himself fascinated, to his detriment, with a distracting libidinous woman for whom he risks everything. I can only imagine that Hitt's editors demanded a triumph for normal morality by the end. The evil influences must not be able to prevail, I guess. The situation plays out as it ought to, given the circumstances, but then, at the end, everything is rudely forced to resolve in a manner consistent with conventional morality. Possibly Orrie Hitt needed to make it end that way?

Orrie Hitt has been referred to as the king of sleaze pulp. He wrote something on the order of 150 books from the 50s to the 70s. At the height of his writing career, Hitt would churn out a book every two weeks, working twelve-hour days and chugging ice coffee at his kitchen table as he furiously typed. His books were all capped with racy, lurid, tawdry covers. The men in his books are all con artists, grifters, shady characters that could charm the skirts off any woman and the women in his books were lushes, tramps, etc.

The Cheaters is not about the type of suburban couples that the title would suggest. Rather, it is a story about Clint and Ann who drifted from town to town working resorts and ended up in the Dells, a neighborhood whose name equated with slums. Clint “wanted a job tending bar as much as [he] wanted three legs in [his] pants but when you’ve got ten bucks in your pocket and a girl waiting for you in a rented room you don’t argue with anything that comes your way.” There’s no glamour here, just hard-luck life. Clint takes a job tending bar and Ann takes a job in a restaurant. The real money in this bar comes from the girls who work it, but there is a crooked cop that wants his cut and his cut just keeps getting larger and larger. The guy who owns the bar wants to move on to other things and offers to sell out to Clint with Clint paying him a fee every month. The real problem just as in most of these pulp novels is the baggage that comes with the bar owner – his wife- Clint “could say she had the face of a movie doll and not miss the target by much.” “Any guy was apt to be unsteady when a dame like this walked in on him. You took one look at her and you saw a bedroom.” Clint is head-over-heels for her and nothing can quench that fire, not even Ann getting pregnant in a world where single girls in desperation sought back-alley abortions if they had the three hundred it cost.

Of course, Debbie – the femme fatale wife of the bar owner – has a price and that’s the insurance proceeds that would come from the bar owner’s death. Yes, the familiar Double Indemnity theme from James Cain is here as in many pulp novels of the fifties. The plot is not terribly complicated, but Hitt makes it his own, drawing the reader into the desperation of the characters in it. No one in his books is wholly good or pure or faultless. His characters are, however, real people living real lives and propelled by forces they cannot control.

Between the crooked cop who has his hand in the till and keeps upping the ante, the bar owner who wants to get paid, and the bar owner’s wife who has Clint dancing like a marionette, it all comes to a head later in the book.

It is a top-notch example of fifties pulp and is quite easy reading. Simply calling it sleaze pulp doesn’t do it justice because Hitt’s world is more than that. It contains these real people who can’t control themselves. They are desperate for money, for love, for a future that is more than they have. And, little by little, the life is squeezed out of these people.

Good stuff.