Review: Chartered Love - Conrad Dawn

I love it when I find a little gem of a book in an unexpected place. At first glance, CHARTERED LOVE looks like it might fall into that category. Originally published in 1960 by Novel Books, one of the bottom-of-the-barrel paperback publlshers that specialized in what was then considered fiction for adults only, it’s the debut novel of Conrad Dawn, an author I’d never heard of, let alone read. Dawn published only six books, all of them from Novel Books in 1960-62. The cover promises some adventure to go along with the risque elements, and the book was reprinted recently by Black Gat Books, a consistently top-notch imprint, with an introduction by Gary Lovisi, an author whose opinions I respect, so yeah, this book might actually be pretty good.

CHARTERED LOVE starts out in very promising fashion. It’s a South Seas adventure yarn with a two-fisted boat skipper being hired by a beautiful young woman to help her recover a fortune in gold bars that went down with a refugee ship sunk by the Japanese during the early days of World War II. This is a very standard adventure plot going back to the pulp days. H. Bedford-Jones wrote probably dozens of stories that used some variation of this concept. So did plenty of other pulpsters, and the sunken treasure plot was used again and again by paperbackers and also hardcover authors such as Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler, Jack Higgins, and Alistair Maclean. It’s a plot that I happen to like a lot, and I’ve even used it myself. Whether it succeeds or not is all a matter of execution. In a familiar tale such as this, a writer has to create strong characters, keep up a fast pace, provide vivid settings, and maybe, in the best of them, come up with a few twists in the standard plot.

A good protagonist is a must for this kind of novel. John Darrow, the skipper of the Malacca Maid, is a very good one. Reasonably smart, plenty tough, with morals just questionable enough to be interesting but still with a code of honor that he follows. The beautiful girl, Elizabeth McClain, is also smart and tough, not the least bit whiny, and a fine match for Darrow. The ship’s crusty old first mate is a great sidekick, the villains who are also after the gold bars are properly oily and evil, and all of them do good work as the story races along. There are some excellent action scenes during a typhoon, and the underwater diving scenes are suitably creepy. You’d barely know this book was from a so-called sleaze publisher. Except for a few mild, not-at-all graphic sex scenes, this reads very much like a Higgins or Maclean novel from the same era.

So, having read it, I’m happy to report that CHARTERED LOVE is indeed one of those lost gems. I thoroughly enjoyed it and give it a high recommendation for fans of sea-going adventure yarns. It's available in paperback and e-book editions. I don’t know if Conrad Dawn’s other books are as good, but I’d love to find out. 

A Rough Edges Rerun: Taboo Thrills - Orrie Hitt

“A Novel Book is a Man’s Book!” It says so right on the spine of Orrie Hitt’s TABOO THRILLS. That’s right, we return to the work of Orrie Hitt and it’s a good one.

First, some history. This book was originally published by Novel Books in 1962 under the title WARPED WOMAN. It was reprinted in 1963 as TABOO THRILLS, the edition I read. Then it was also reprinted in 1964 as WILMA’S WANTS. The folks at Novel Books, a Chicago publisher of soft-core porn and crime novels, must have really liked it.

Although the cover and the various titles make it sound like one of Hitt’s lesbian novels, it’s really not. It’s actually a semi-autobiographical yarn narrated by one Chet Long, a prolific author of what he refers to as “realistic” novels, by which, of course, he means the sort of Adults Only, early Sixties soft-core novels that this is. Chet lives in upstate New York (like Orrie Hitt), broke in by writing articles for hunting and outdoors magazines (like Orrie Hitt), and bangs out his books on a manual typewriter sitting at the kitchen table (like Orrie Hitt). The main difference is that while Hitt was a happily married man with a family, Chet Long is single and has a rich girlfriend, along with a number of other women on the side.

There’s not much plot here. Most of the book is concerned with a soap-opera-like romantic triangle involving Chet, Wilma (the rich, repressed girlfriend who hates the books he writes), and Sandy, a beautiful young free-spirited waitress who is much more suited to him. There’s also a peeping tom prowling the small city where they all live. (The peeping tom novel was another of Hitt’s specialties.) The plot just serves as an excuse for a number of lengthy rants against censorship and big government, both of which Hitt seems to have disliked equally.

But in the midst of all that are some wonderful bits about the life of a freelance writer, such as this comment from Sandy:

“I don’t get it,” she said. “I’ve read about writers and it seems crazy to me. You just write this junk and somebody prints it?”

I don’t know, of course, but I suspect that Hitt had a smile on his face when he wrote that paragraph.

Here’s a more serious passage I liked:

They say there’s tension in the advertising business but filling a blank sheet of paper is just as much tension. Your belly crawls when you can’t seem to do what you want to do. You struggle, you sweat – that’s nerves – you do the best you can, which is seldom good enough, and then you go to a bar where nobody gives a damn about what you do. You talk to men on the railroad, a retired lush who’s trying to stretch his Social Security check to the end of the month, some dame who’s got more kids than she needs and is knocked up again. You listen, buy a drink for somebody who can’t afford it – and maybe you take something about one, add it to the tragedy of another, and put it on paper. Or maybe the next day you’ve forgotten, lost in your own world because it is a world that is yours alone, since, as with all men, you are finally alone. Every man is an island, John Donne to the contrary. In the morning you make your coffee, read an out of town paper if it arrives on time, place your cup and saucer into the sink with assorted dirty dishes, and become a machine that spews words for readers you will never meet. You hope it’s a creative machine.

That’s not the most smoothly written passage in the world, but it’s got a passion and intensity to it that lifts this book to something more than sleaze, at least as far as I’m concerned. In another place, in talking about his writing career, Chet says something that reminds me of Robert E. Howard:

. . . people will suffer to accomplish what they want. Or perhaps it isn’t suffering so much as it is to have the guts to aim at a target and not be satisfied until they hit it. To many, mine wasn’t a very large target but it was one that many missed.

Finally, there’s another funny bit where Chet grabs a book off the newsstand at the train station so he’ll have something to read on a trip to New York City. He picks the book because the title intrigues him and doesn’t notice the name of the author, never realizing until he starts to read it that it’s one of his own novels, with his original title changed by the publisher. Given the history of this particular book – three editions in three years with three different titles – that’s a bit of inadvertent humor.

Unlike some of the other Hitt novels I’ve read, the ending of TABOO THRILLS is pretty believable and satisfying. Hitt evidently did some of his best or at least some of his most personal work for Novel Books, and I’m going to be on the lookout for more of those books. If you run across a copy of TABOO THRILLS (or WARPED WOMAN or WILMA’S WANTS), I think it’s well worth picking up and reading.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 22, 2009. I found an image of the cover of WARPED WOMAN, which you can see below, but WILMA'S WANTS seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Irwin Shaw's story "Main Currents of American Thought" captures being a freelance writer better than any other piece of fiction I've ever read, but this Orrie Hitt novel comes close to the same level.)