Shabby Street

Orrie Hitt (1916-1975) was an Upstate New York author of sleaze paperbacks who made a living writing a lot of books very quickly. The upshot is that he became a very good author and often incorporated crime and noir into his PG-13 sex scenes. Shabby Street was a 1954 Beacon paperback (cvr Walter Popp) that has been reprinted by Prologue Books.

Johnny Reagan is our narrator, and he’s a cynical front desk clerk at a sleazy urban hotel with faded rugs and saggy furniture. The only thing he likes about his job is that he gets to ogle sexy Janet, the in-house phone operator. “The only difference between the Hotel Shelly and the city dump was that the hotel had a roof over it,” Johnny explains.

One night after work, Johnny finally beds down with Janet, and she’s already planning a future with our hero, the cad. Meanwhile, Johnny was just looking to get laid, as guys do. Johnny also gets intimately reacquainted with a gal named Julie, whom he’s known forever growing up on skid row.

Johnny is seeking to leave the hotel and go to work as a life insurance salesman - this was done door-to-door back then. The insurance agency owner’s jailbait doctor is a real dish, so now Johnny has three babes to juggle.

It takes forever to get there, but eventually Johnny implements a criminal insurance scheme to make some money behind his boss’s back. Can Johnny adeptly rip off his boss and keep three unsuspecting women satisfied? Fat chance.

I have a theory - and hear me out on this - I think that when Hitt wrote this novel in 1953-1954, he was seeking to mimic the skid row novels of David Goodis, whose Philadelphia is a decaying, hopeless environment that traps people emotionally. Shabby Street does the same thing with Clarke Street and the Hotel Shelly. The neighborhood feels diseased rather than merely poor.

The distinction is that Goodis was a master plotter, whereas Shabby Street is all over the place with Hitt trying to pad the story, apparently to hit a Beacon Books word count. Also, Goodis’ protagonists tend to be redeemable people in awful environments, whereas Hitt’s Shabby Street hero is just a heel who deserves his comeuppance.

Shabby Street is often cited as a high watermark in Hitt’s vast catalog of novels, but I beg to differ. There are so many better books he authored - many of which were reviewed here at Paperback Warrior. Start there. You’ll have a lot of reading ahead of you before you descend to Shabby Street.

Get the book HERE.