Author: Orrie Hitt Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories:
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This is a sordid tale, undoubtedly quickly written, but for the most part well told. Clint has come to town with his longtime girlfriend & goes to work at a bar run by Charlie. Charlie of course has a beautiful wife with enormous breasts--pages are spent describing them. There's a $150,000 insurance policy & a despicable corrupt cop in the picture too. The cop comes around every week collecting protection money from the bar owner, who lets prostitutes use the bar to ply their trade. Inbetween the sex scenes, Hitt is still trying to tell a good, dark story. He succeeds. Clint has a few qualms about the business with the prostitutes, but when the chance to buy the bar comes along, he takes it, & gets into a deeper mess than he could have foreseen. If you're a fan of Hitt or this type of hardboiled novel, you'll enjoy it. Hitt's fictional world is like a more explicit, tho slightly less perverse version of the world Charles Willeford created in Pick Up, the Woman Chaser, the Black Mass of Brother Springer & other of his early works, with a protagonist you'll have a hard time developing much sympathy for. First line: " I wanted a job tending bar about as much as I wanted three legs in my pants but when you've got ten bucks in your pocket and a girl waiting for you in a rented room, you don't argue with anything that comes your way. "
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