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. Lurid, salacious, scandalous at a time --1962-- when people would
hide such things in briefcases and in newspapers.

What was Hitt up to? Besides paying the bills. Scratch the surface and suburbia ain't what it was advertised to be.Jerry and Olive met at a party and married after three months. Although he works in the City for a sleazy Men's magazine featuring scantily clad young ladies, they move out to the new development in Clinton. Olive finds the town dull. Nothing to do but drink. She is bored
with Jerry and finds her neighbor Sally stimulating. Jerry finds his wife frigid and rides the bus instead of the train because he has his eyes on a lady who lives down his street - Betty. Rather
than head home, he maneuvers Betty into having drinks with him.

No one else In suburbia seems to be happy with their crappy jobs, their screaming kids, or their spouses. Fred claims he goes bowling with the guys every Friday just so he can sneak off to see Ruth while Harold stays late in the city where Sally assumes he's meeting some girl from the office.

Throughout this crazy soap opera, once you get past the salaciousness, you realize how utterly miserable most of these characters are. And, it's not just their romantic lives either. Olive's father borrowed too much and lost every penny and then some. Betty married a bum who couldn't hold a job and took a settlement from his rotten family to walk from their rotten marriage. Unlike some other Orrie Hitt books, there's no con game or scheme going on. Just people struggling with the middle class dream. Yes, it's dated in attitudes and mores and assumptions, but it's a scandalous
Dimestore paperback from the early sixties so whaddaya expect.
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