The Cheaters

Orrie Hitt (1916-1975) was an astonishingly productive pulp fiction writer — he published 108 novels during a six-year stretch between 1957 and 1962 — and his books were unique in their realistic depiction of working-class American life. One of his better works was The Cheaters, a dark and sordid 1960 crime novel about a pair of young drifters (Clint and Ann) who find jobs in a small industrial town in upstate New York. The town's deeply corrupt atmosphere — not just its citizens but the police — owes something to Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson.