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Untamed Lust
Wildwood Acres was a civilized wilderness up-state, playground of crippled, uppercrust Frank Jennings - a man of untamed lust . . . of strange, untrammeled passions . . . of urges to hurt and kill anything and anybody defenseless enough. For his pleasure he collected not only helpless animals, but also an assortment of beautiful women . . .
There was summer-hot Kitty, his simmering young wife. There was radiantly blonde Carole, as twisted as Jennings himself. There was jet-haired Joan Keider, who refused to starve for thrills while a guy like Eddie Boyd was in the last neighborhood.
Eddie dallied with Joan, and toyed with pretty Kitty. Then even Carole was driven into his arms by Jennings’ brutalities. Like the rest of them, Eddie was getting the message - ''You only live once - but you can love plenty of times!''
Trapped by luxury, warped by hate, could these brutalized lust-mongers attain a second chance?
There was summer-hot Kitty, his simmering young wife. There was radiantly blonde Carole, as twisted as Jennings himself. There was jet-haired Joan Keider, who refused to starve for thrills while a guy like Eddie Boyd was in the last neighborhood.
Eddie dallied with Joan, and toyed with pretty Kitty. Then even Carole was driven into his arms by Jennings’ brutalities. Like the rest of them, Eddie was getting the message - ''You only live once - but you can love plenty of times!''
Trapped by luxury, warped by hate, could these brutalized lust-mongers attain a second chance?
156 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
5 people are currently reading
15 people want to read
About the author
Orrie Hitt
221 books31 followersOrrie Edwin Hitt was born in Colchester and died from cancer in a VA hospital in Montrose, NY. He married Charlotte Tucker in Pt Jervis, NY (a small town upstate where he became a lifelong resident), on Valentine’s Day, '43. Orrie & Charlotte had 4 kids—Joyce, Margaret, David & Nancy. He was under 5’5″, taking a 27' inseam, which his wife altered because no one sold pants so short.
Hitt wrote maybe 150 books. He wasn’t sure. “I’m no adding machine”, he answered on the back cover of his book Naked Flesh, when asked how many he’d written. “All I do is write. I usually start at 7 in the morning, take 20 minutes for lunch & continue until about 4 in the afternoon.” Hitt wrote a novel every 2 weeks in his prime, typing over 85 wpm. “His fastest & best works were produced when he was allowed to type whatever he wanted,” said his children. “His slowest works were produced when publishers insisted on a certain kind of novel, extra spicy etc.”
Most of Hitt’s books were PBOs. He also wrote some hardcovers. Pseudonyms include Kay Addams, Joe Black, Roger Normandie, Charles Verne & Nicky Weaver. Publishers include Avon, Beacon (later Softcover Library), Chariot, Domino (Lancer), Ember Library, Gaslight, Key Publishing, Kozy, MacFadden, Midwood, Novel, P.E.C, Red Lantern, Sabre, Uni-books, Valentine Books, Vantage Press, Vest-Pocket & Wisdom House.
He wrote in the adults only genre. Many of such writers were hacks, using thin plots as an excuse to throw tits & ass between covers for a quick buck. Others used the genre as a stepping stone to legitimate writing, later dismissing this part of their career. There were few like Hitt, whose writing left an original, idiosyncratic & lasting mark even beyond the horizons of '50s-mid 60s adult publishing. What made him unique was his belief he was writing realistically about the needs & desires, the brutality (both verbal & physical), the hypocritical lives inside the suburban tracts houses & the limited economic opportunities for women that lay beneath the glossy, Super Cinecolor, Father Knows Best surface of American life. He studied what he wrote about. Wanting to write about a nudist camp, he went to one tho “he wouldn't disrobe”.
His research allowed him to write convincingly. S. Stryker, in her Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback, says, “Only one actual lesbian, Kay Addams, writing as Orrie Hitt, is known to have churned out semipornographic sleaze novels for a predominantly male audience.” She thought “Orrie Hitt” a pseudonym, & “Kay Addams” a real lesbian author! Orrie’d like that one.
It wasn’t just about sex. It was also about guts. “The characters,” Hitt’s protagonist–a movie producer complimenting a screenwriter on her work–says in the novel Man-Hungry Female, “were very real, red blooded people who tore at the guts of life. That’s what I’m after. Guts.” If anyone knew about guts, it was him.
Life started out tough for Hitt. His father committed suicide when he was 11. “Dad seldom spoke of his father, who'd committed suicide, because it was a very unpleasant chapter in his life,” said his children.
After Father’s death, Orrie & his mother moved to Forestburgh, NY, where they worked for a hunting-fishing club. He started doing chores for wealthy members for $.10 hourly. Management offered him a better job later, at .25 hourly. Eventually, he became club caretaker & supervisor. “Dad talked a lot about working as a child to help his mother make ends meet,” his children recalled. “He wanted his children to have a better life while growing up.”
Tragedy struck Hitt again during those years. His children explain: “Dad’s mom died at her sister’s house on the club property during an ice storm, so Dad walked to the house to get his mother & carried her back to his car"
Hitt wrote maybe 150 books. He wasn’t sure. “I’m no adding machine”, he answered on the back cover of his book Naked Flesh, when asked how many he’d written. “All I do is write. I usually start at 7 in the morning, take 20 minutes for lunch & continue until about 4 in the afternoon.” Hitt wrote a novel every 2 weeks in his prime, typing over 85 wpm. “His fastest & best works were produced when he was allowed to type whatever he wanted,” said his children. “His slowest works were produced when publishers insisted on a certain kind of novel, extra spicy etc.”
Most of Hitt’s books were PBOs. He also wrote some hardcovers. Pseudonyms include Kay Addams, Joe Black, Roger Normandie, Charles Verne & Nicky Weaver. Publishers include Avon, Beacon (later Softcover Library), Chariot, Domino (Lancer), Ember Library, Gaslight, Key Publishing, Kozy, MacFadden, Midwood, Novel, P.E.C, Red Lantern, Sabre, Uni-books, Valentine Books, Vantage Press, Vest-Pocket & Wisdom House.
He wrote in the adults only genre. Many of such writers were hacks, using thin plots as an excuse to throw tits & ass between covers for a quick buck. Others used the genre as a stepping stone to legitimate writing, later dismissing this part of their career. There were few like Hitt, whose writing left an original, idiosyncratic & lasting mark even beyond the horizons of '50s-mid 60s adult publishing. What made him unique was his belief he was writing realistically about the needs & desires, the brutality (both verbal & physical), the hypocritical lives inside the suburban tracts houses & the limited economic opportunities for women that lay beneath the glossy, Super Cinecolor, Father Knows Best surface of American life. He studied what he wrote about. Wanting to write about a nudist camp, he went to one tho “he wouldn't disrobe”.
His research allowed him to write convincingly. S. Stryker, in her Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback, says, “Only one actual lesbian, Kay Addams, writing as Orrie Hitt, is known to have churned out semipornographic sleaze novels for a predominantly male audience.” She thought “Orrie Hitt” a pseudonym, & “Kay Addams” a real lesbian author! Orrie’d like that one.
It wasn’t just about sex. It was also about guts. “The characters,” Hitt’s protagonist–a movie producer complimenting a screenwriter on her work–says in the novel Man-Hungry Female, “were very real, red blooded people who tore at the guts of life. That’s what I’m after. Guts.” If anyone knew about guts, it was him.
Life started out tough for Hitt. His father committed suicide when he was 11. “Dad seldom spoke of his father, who'd committed suicide, because it was a very unpleasant chapter in his life,” said his children.
After Father’s death, Orrie & his mother moved to Forestburgh, NY, where they worked for a hunting-fishing club. He started doing chores for wealthy members for $.10 hourly. Management offered him a better job later, at .25 hourly. Eventually, he became club caretaker & supervisor. “Dad talked a lot about working as a child to help his mother make ends meet,” his children recalled. “He wanted his children to have a better life while growing up.”
Tragedy struck Hitt again during those years. His children explain: “Dad’s mom died at her sister’s house on the club property during an ice storm, so Dad walked to the house to get his mother & carried her back to his car"
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 22, 2017
I was reading recently on the RARA AVIS group -- where people congregate who know a lot more than I do about hardboiled/noir fiction -- that Orrie Hitt was a noirish author of interest: apparently he wrote hardboiled thrillers with a sort of PG+ modicum of sex, then watched as his editor gave them salacious titles and, if the whim so minded, added in a few raunchier passages.
I'm not sure this is quite what went on here. If you're looking for out-and-out rauncherama, go look elsewhere. On the one side the book delivers a heck of a lot less than the title promises; on the other, although it's a Postman Always Rings Twice riff, there's enough lasciviousness[*] about the various women involved in the tale that you could be forgiven for failing to spot the noirish plot.
Eddie Boyd seduced his childhood sweetheart Joan (or was it mutual?) when they were both in their inexperienced teens, and everyone, themselves included, assumed they'd eventually get hitched. But they had a stupid spat and Joan married a guy named Paul, who soon proved to be a cad (as guys named Paul so often do). Once she realized her mistake and Paul was hauled off to the hoosegaw for adulterously impregnating a teen, she reunited with Eddie and, shucks, it's all been great since then. Now she's employed on the ranch of crippled, sadistic millionaire Frank Jennings, and has persuaded Jennings to offer Eddie a job as his trapper, so she and Eddie can spend each and every night together.
Trouble is, Jennings has a much younger second wife, Kitty, who's so hot you can hear her sizzle. And, by his first wife, Jennings has an of-age daughter, Carole, who's even hotter. At one point we discover of Carole that "She took a deep breath and her breasts filled up like a couple of balloons at a birthday party." Golly.
Natch, Eddie soon persuades himself that he's mad in love with Kitty and Kitty soon persuades the sap that she's mad in love with him so if he could just murder Jennings they could get married and live happily ever after on Jennings's money. Meanwhile Eddie, staggering as he walks and with his hands a-tremble because thrice or more daily he's having to satisfy Carole, plus there are the torrid nights with Kitty, oh, and he's just discovered Joan is carrying his child, must try to sort out his ethical quandary.
Ho-hum.
The problem with this book is not the focus on sex -- although I did become very weary of Eddie's inability to see a woman other than in terms of her bust-size, while I also wondered about the engineering plausibility of some of the bodily measurements described -- but the fact that Hitt seems incapable of keeping his characters consistent (bust measurements aside). It's almost as if he hammered out a few thousand words a day then relaxed in the evening, as one does, with a few bottles of Guatemalan Beaujolais, then approached the typewriter the next morning with only a bleary memory of what had gone before.
I'm very likely doing him an injustice. Perhaps the idea is that we're seeing the red-hot female characters through Eddie's exhausted bloodshot gaze.
Or something.
Hitt could write; that much is certain. I'll be trying more of his novels (they're short, which helps); that's certain too. This one could definitely be better, but as an introduction to his work it could be a lot worse.
===========
[*] Although I've corrected it, I originally committed what might be the typo of the week for me: "ladsciviousness."
I'm not sure this is quite what went on here. If you're looking for out-and-out rauncherama, go look elsewhere. On the one side the book delivers a heck of a lot less than the title promises; on the other, although it's a Postman Always Rings Twice riff, there's enough lasciviousness[*] about the various women involved in the tale that you could be forgiven for failing to spot the noirish plot.
Eddie Boyd seduced his childhood sweetheart Joan (or was it mutual?) when they were both in their inexperienced teens, and everyone, themselves included, assumed they'd eventually get hitched. But they had a stupid spat and Joan married a guy named Paul, who soon proved to be a cad (as guys named Paul so often do). Once she realized her mistake and Paul was hauled off to the hoosegaw for adulterously impregnating a teen, she reunited with Eddie and, shucks, it's all been great since then. Now she's employed on the ranch of crippled, sadistic millionaire Frank Jennings, and has persuaded Jennings to offer Eddie a job as his trapper, so she and Eddie can spend each and every night together.
Trouble is, Jennings has a much younger second wife, Kitty, who's so hot you can hear her sizzle. And, by his first wife, Jennings has an of-age daughter, Carole, who's even hotter. At one point we discover of Carole that "She took a deep breath and her breasts filled up like a couple of balloons at a birthday party." Golly.
Natch, Eddie soon persuades himself that he's mad in love with Kitty and Kitty soon persuades the sap that she's mad in love with him so if he could just murder Jennings they could get married and live happily ever after on Jennings's money. Meanwhile Eddie, staggering as he walks and with his hands a-tremble because thrice or more daily he's having to satisfy Carole, plus there are the torrid nights with Kitty, oh, and he's just discovered Joan is carrying his child, must try to sort out his ethical quandary.
Ho-hum.
The problem with this book is not the focus on sex -- although I did become very weary of Eddie's inability to see a woman other than in terms of her bust-size, while I also wondered about the engineering plausibility of some of the bodily measurements described -- but the fact that Hitt seems incapable of keeping his characters consistent (bust measurements aside). It's almost as if he hammered out a few thousand words a day then relaxed in the evening, as one does, with a few bottles of Guatemalan Beaujolais, then approached the typewriter the next morning with only a bleary memory of what had gone before.
I'm very likely doing him an injustice. Perhaps the idea is that we're seeing the red-hot female characters through Eddie's exhausted bloodshot gaze.
Or something.
Hitt could write; that much is certain. I'll be trying more of his novels (they're short, which helps); that's certain too. This one could definitely be better, but as an introduction to his work it could be a lot worse.
===========
[*] Although I've corrected it, I originally committed what might be the typo of the week for me: "ladsciviousness."
August 27, 2021
In between all the sleaze-noir rutting, what we have here is some of Hitt's most evocative writing. And where does his best writing show up? In his descriptions of Eddie out trapping animals in the woods. Fascinating that one of the rare times that Hitt's writing approaches literary quality is when he describes trapping turtles, otter, fox, and mink. Hitt is usually at his best when describing his characters at their work and he is at the top of his game describing Eddie in the woods. He is laughable, however, when he describes Eddie bedding down the three women in this novel with prose steeped in junior high sensibility. Hard to get too excited about this novel because its interesting characters and a good noir plot are obscured by Hitt's at times shallow writing.
September 12, 2021
Pulpy meandering drivel. I wanted to read Orrie Hitt because his name kept popping up as an interesting Noir-ish tawdry take on modern living, but this one promises a bit of action, but delivers nothing much. Big tough drifter wanders onto a ranch and is hired as a hunter because the crippled man has a warped hatred of animals. Soon, the man's lusty wife and daughter are after this big sensitive galoof and succeeding for the most part in taking him down. Of course the lowlife wife wants her bad husband killed for the money and .... who knows what will happen. Actually it is all a very happy ending all around. nothing to the story though.
June 9, 2017
In this particular novel, Eddie Boyd is out of work and locked out of his apt for unpaid rent. Eddie's life philosophy is that a guy lives once and takes what he can get. Joan, a childhood friend who is waiting for her divorce and who thinks Eddie will marry her, gets him a job as a
trapper at Wildwood Acres, a 2,000 acre estate. The previous trapper was fired because he got fresh with Jennings' wife and daughter.
Jennings had fallen from a horse and is now in a wheelchair. Of course Jennings' wife Kitty is a Lot younger than him, wears clothes that barely cover her, and has looks that could grace the cover of a girlie
magazine. Kitty decides she wants Eddie to join her swimming and when he refuses she threatens to tell her husband that Eddie made a pass at her. Uh oh. Kitty sounds like trouble.
Carole, Jenning's daughter is trouble too in much the same way. Eddie can't stay out of
trouble cause one of these three women convinces Eddie to get involved in murder. Another manipulates him into blackmail. Poor guy. He's actually one of Hitt's more decent protagonists. He's not a
swindler. The women in this book are the devious ones. All in all, a very worthwhile read, particularly if you have an interest in
the dime store novels of the fifties.
trapper at Wildwood Acres, a 2,000 acre estate. The previous trapper was fired because he got fresh with Jennings' wife and daughter.
Jennings had fallen from a horse and is now in a wheelchair. Of course Jennings' wife Kitty is a Lot younger than him, wears clothes that barely cover her, and has looks that could grace the cover of a girlie
magazine. Kitty decides she wants Eddie to join her swimming and when he refuses she threatens to tell her husband that Eddie made a pass at her. Uh oh. Kitty sounds like trouble.
Carole, Jenning's daughter is trouble too in much the same way. Eddie can't stay out of
trouble cause one of these three women convinces Eddie to get involved in murder. Another manipulates him into blackmail. Poor guy. He's actually one of Hitt's more decent protagonists. He's not a
swindler. The women in this book are the devious ones. All in all, a very worthwhile read, particularly if you have an interest in
the dime store novels of the fifties.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 16, 2025
I can’t believe I read this whole thing- especially because it’s literally just ridiculousness. Bro just goes around banging everyone in the book- not graphically… classily I guess in a way. All that being said it held my attention and I read the whole thing in a couple of days.
October 23, 2016
Farm hand falls bass-ackwards into more tail than he can handle -- human and animal. It's a lot of he-man fun until the ending, a huge let down.
Quotations:
"her breasts filled up like a couple of balloons at a birthday party"
"For a moment he had a wild impulse to... give her a second honeymoon right there in the woods."
"The farmers didn't take into account that half the time their daughters asked for it one way or another."
Quotations:
"her breasts filled up like a couple of balloons at a birthday party"
"For a moment he had a wild impulse to... give her a second honeymoon right there in the woods."
"The farmers didn't take into account that half the time their daughters asked for it one way or another."
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews