Review: Tawny

Tawny by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tawny, (Beacon B261, 1959), is a reprint of Cabin Fever (Uni-book 73, 1954) with a new title and new cover art. Cabin Fever was Hitt's third published book and it shows, with some sloppy writing in places. That said, we have here a cool dust-up at a summer resort in rural New York. Danny, our focal character and first-rate heel, manages to get drunk and rolled while on vacation. But he takes a job at the resort as a means to get back on the cash. He's quickly chasing after the owner's wife - the femme fatale character - in between chasing after the hostess and his late arriving former girlfriend. There are several other shady characters and everybody seems to have an angle to rip somebody else off. Danny is slow on the uptake, thinks he's in the driver seat, planning his own scam, but as they say about poker games, if you don't know who the mark is . . . All good fun if you put on the editorial blinders. Hitt's book Summer Hotel (Beacon B168, 1958) picks up many of these same themes a few years later and is more smoothly written. Tawny is the femme fatale character but the novel is not focalized through her, so it's one of those marketing bait and switches where the cover art and blurbs suggest one story but what you get is something else entirely.

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