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Ladies' Man
Alice was sweet, Marie was stacked, Lola was loaded and Marie was...willing! So says the cheesy cover of this pulp detective novel. At top it says, He Knew the way to a girl's heart...and BODY!! Imagine that. A lot of the old pulp detective and adventure novels had pap like that on the cover, to make the purchaser think it was all about sex, and it worked, so they threw in a few sex scenes just to make the tale spicy. 'Nuff said.
- GenresFiction
189 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
2 people are currently reading
13 people want to read
About the author
Orrie Hitt
221 books30 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 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 31, 2012
When I hover over two stars it says "it was okay." That's how I feel about this story. It was okay. It's the continuing adventures of the hero from
and had I not read that I would have liked this book better.
It's very noir, very well done, but I was disappointed and saddened by how the main character had been changed from a fairly good guy to a woman-hater.
The book stands on it's own - you don't have to have read the first one - and if I hadn't I probably would have given this three or four stars as a solid noir caper in which everyone is out for something and who will win is anybody's guess.
and had I not read that I would have liked this book better. It's very noir, very well done, but I was disappointed and saddened by how the main character had been changed from a fairly good guy to a woman-hater.
The book stands on it's own - you don't have to have read the first one - and if I hadn't I probably would have given this three or four stars as a solid noir caper in which everyone is out for something and who will win is anybody's guess.
July 15, 2017
Orrie Hitt wrote sleaze pulp in the fifties that bore lurid covers and racy titles. The men in his books were all conmen, grifters, and other types of sleazeballs. The women were tramps and lushes. Nicky Weaver stars in two of Hitt's sleazy masterpieces, "I'll Call Every Monday" and "Ladies' Man." Weaver had gotten burned before by women and by business and he was sour and cynical and would do just about anything for money. He thought women were "always on hand to drain you dry, leaving you ready to push down any road where you thought there might be money around the next curve."
After pulling an insurance scam in "I'll Call Every Monday," one that went sour real quick, Weaver heads into Chesterville in response to an ad for a radio salesman. "It looked like a lazy town, a dumb town," but he had nothing better going on. When he gets to the radio station, the appearance of the little yellow building "left him almost as cold as a streetwalker's heart." "To Nicky, it looked like a place in which it would be ridiculous for anybody to try to make a living." But, of course, that was before he met Marie, the owner of the station, having inherited it from her father and left saddled with his debts. She often sat in her office, drowning her troubles in a bottle or two of booze. Nicky "could smell her even before he saw her and after he saw her he couldn't say anything at all." "She was a white blonde with lips the color of fresh blood." "Her hips, as she walked across the office, rolled like they were fastened to her with ball bearings." But, he wondered if she would be another Bess, another Irene, "a glamorous agglutination of female flesh with the mind of a pickpocket." "He was hard, bitter inside and he belonged with the real bastards, the kind who'd swipe flowers off a grave to send to a wedding."
It's interesting how Nicky takes to running the radio station after a hilarious first night of playing records at the wrong speed and leaving his microphone off. Eventually, he comes up with a foolproof scheme to get lots of money and the hell with anyone who gets in his way.
How can you like such sleazy, dirty, conniving, bitter people? Orrie Hitt has a magic way of creating such characters out of whole cloth and reeling the reader in so that the reader finds them fascinating, finds their exploits and their dirty deeds fascinating. There is nothing soft or fuzzy about a Hitt novel and the lead characters could never be confused with white knights or fairy princesses, but there is a hard, gutsy reality about his writing. A Hitt novel is not for everyone and some will be put off by the sleaziness of the characters who aren't saints or angels and Nicky Weaver is watching every woman who walks by in a tight sweater and thinking how to put the make on her. But, as long as you know what you are getting into, you can settle back and enjoy this novel for what it is and the characters for who they are.
After pulling an insurance scam in "I'll Call Every Monday," one that went sour real quick, Weaver heads into Chesterville in response to an ad for a radio salesman. "It looked like a lazy town, a dumb town," but he had nothing better going on. When he gets to the radio station, the appearance of the little yellow building "left him almost as cold as a streetwalker's heart." "To Nicky, it looked like a place in which it would be ridiculous for anybody to try to make a living." But, of course, that was before he met Marie, the owner of the station, having inherited it from her father and left saddled with his debts. She often sat in her office, drowning her troubles in a bottle or two of booze. Nicky "could smell her even before he saw her and after he saw her he couldn't say anything at all." "She was a white blonde with lips the color of fresh blood." "Her hips, as she walked across the office, rolled like they were fastened to her with ball bearings." But, he wondered if she would be another Bess, another Irene, "a glamorous agglutination of female flesh with the mind of a pickpocket." "He was hard, bitter inside and he belonged with the real bastards, the kind who'd swipe flowers off a grave to send to a wedding."
It's interesting how Nicky takes to running the radio station after a hilarious first night of playing records at the wrong speed and leaving his microphone off. Eventually, he comes up with a foolproof scheme to get lots of money and the hell with anyone who gets in his way.
How can you like such sleazy, dirty, conniving, bitter people? Orrie Hitt has a magic way of creating such characters out of whole cloth and reeling the reader in so that the reader finds them fascinating, finds their exploits and their dirty deeds fascinating. There is nothing soft or fuzzy about a Hitt novel and the lead characters could never be confused with white knights or fairy princesses, but there is a hard, gutsy reality about his writing. A Hitt novel is not for everyone and some will be put off by the sleaziness of the characters who aren't saints or angels and Nicky Weaver is watching every woman who walks by in a tight sweater and thinking how to put the make on her. But, as long as you know what you are getting into, you can settle back and enjoy this novel for what it is and the characters for who they are.
April 29, 2016
Just to be clear, this is not a work of literature being reviewed. Its faults are legion, not the least of which is the 1950s era misogyny, which, granted, is somewhat tempered by the overarching tone of misanthropy. It’s a guilty pleasure read lasting the length a flight from Seattle to San Francisco. And on those terms this was a fun read. It’s a sequel of sorts to Hitt’s I’ll Call Every Monday and picks up the trail of Nicky Weaver who after getting the shaft in the last book is now looking to even the score. The previous book was a first-person narrative and one of its strengths was the narrative voice, and give Hitt credit here because Ladies Man is a third-person narrative and even though it is not free-indirect the narration fairly drips with Nicky Weaver’s voice. The other strength of the book is the continuously evolving scheme that Nicky cooks up, but of course he gets too full of himself and underestimates the woman he is trying to fleece and spoiler alert . . .
July 20, 2010
This a book called the Ladies Man by Nicky Wanton (it's my first attempt at a hardboiled mystery and probably my last
read Ladies man was ok but wouldn't read it again
read Ladies man was ok but wouldn't read it again
September 27, 2013
Orrie Hitt's novels are an easy read and certainly fits my enjoyment of pulp fiction.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews