Orrie hitt biography of william shakespeare

I may have become a fan after reading this 1957 novel by Orrie Hitt. The (great!) cover art and cover copy is misleading — it seems to indcate that it’s about a sleaze merchant in female flesh but it’s not, really, or: the guy on the cover is not the narrator.

The narrator is Bill Morgan, a freelance magazine writer who specializes in pieces for car magazines.

He heads into a small New Jersey town to interview a church minister, Dr. Call,  who has boys re-build cars, believing it keeps them off the streets and getting into gangs and crime. There he meets the minister’s daughter, Judith Call, who is on her way out of the small town with her dreams for New York City and the high life.

She uses the distraction of the writer being there to slip out and run away.

Dr. Call and the church elders wish to hire Morgan for an information job — they have heard about sleaze tabloids, the selling of nudie pictures, an underworld of sex and sin in New York, bu