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, he would churn out a book every two weeks, working 12 hour days. His books were all capped with racy, lurid, tawdry covers. Yes, he has similar themes running throughout his work. The men are all con artists, grifters, shady characters that could charm the skirts off any woman. The women in his books were lushes and tramps. And the men typically are juggling three women.

This book is solidly in the noir category. It's as if Hitt swallowed up some of Gil Brewer's Florida pulps and mixed them in with Block's Killing Castro (which came a couple if years later). Our hero, Clint Walker, is a bitter, disillusioned guy whose wife left him for his brother and he turned to rum - lots of rum. "There was a time when my marriage to Rose had been like a cruiser, sleek and sharp," Clint explains. "All that was left from the marriage was the boat, and for two years that had been enough." "It was a hell of a life; a stinking life. You married one girl, thought she was everything you had ever looked for, and she was nothing but a tramp." How's that for bitter and unhappy? She was a woman, raw and inviting, but Clint knew she was as poisonous as one of the snakes in the Everglades.
After drowning his sorrows for two years, Clint's got nothing but a fast boat that, on the days he is sober, he uses for fishing charters. Clint rents the dock from Frank Stearns and his innocent young college- educated daughter Betty, who parades around in a black bathing suit. "She had a full smile, one that washed over you and made the sun seem brighter." He sees her as a sweet kid and feels guilty for taking advantage of her, but how could he help himself.

Vera and her father, George Gordon, come along and offer Clint a king's ransom for running guns to late fifties Cuba where a revolution is brewing. He doesn't like it, but after some thugs beat him senseless and make off with what's left of his money, what choice does he have? Vera was a lighter blonde than Betty, but then all comparisons stopped. "She came across the dock, the high heels if her black pumps making a lot of noise." Her yellow dress hides little. What Clint saw "was enough to drive a sane man out of his mind. This girl had been put together with one mold, just one, and afterward they had thrown the thing away." Clint had been to nightclubs and stag shows, but had
never seen anything like her. "This girl leaked sex all over the place like a leaky faucet."
Clint falls for her, throwing everything else away to help with the smuggling scheme and looking forward to the fantasy of running off to Mexico with Vera.

Here, you have politics, revolution, a sea adventure, a bitter divorced shell of a man, and you have a powerful story. You can literally feel Clint's hunger for money and Vera, even as you know he is sinking into a whirlpool he can't climb out of. This story is far more than just Dimestore trash. It is a story about someone down on their luck, whose dreams have been smashed, and who is not willing to be a sucker again.

Orrie Hitt is not for everyone. Remember, he was called the king of sleaze and the story has a lot of sexual innuendo. ( )

Another formulaic story by Hitt set in the Florida Keys, circa 1959. This one has even more sex than usual as the good-for-nothing protagonist, with only a fast boat to his name, becomes involved with both the daughter of the man he is renting dock space from and the daughter of a shady character running guns to Cuba. If that isn't complicated enough, his ex-wife comes back into the mix. Even when the protagonist does something decent, it doesn't make him any better. Apparently, though, this is the type of man the typical male reader of a book like this is supposed to admire--all day long he either makes love or drinks copious amounts of rum or whatever else is at hand. As in his other books that I have read, Hitt's writing is better than it needs to be. ( )