A while back we said we’d skip the 1954 Orrie Hitt novel Cabin Fever because we had several other Hitt books awaiting our attention. But the cover art for 1959’s Tawny enticed us, so we bought it and—turns out we didn’t pass on Cabin Fever after all, because Tawny is Cabin Fever published under a new name. It was also published yet again in 1974 as Lovers at Night. Lesson: watch out for re-titles in vintage literature. But it’s okay. Hitt is interesting if erratic, and since this is an early effort from him—possibly only his third, though we can’t be sure because he published four books in 1954—we were curious to have a look.

Tawny follows the travails of Danny O’Conner, who takes a job managing a sprawling lakeside roadhouse/casino/cabin complex called the Flying Red Rooster and quickly becomes romatically entangled with the boss’s omnivorous wife, the eponymous Tawny Stone. She hates her husband but divorcing him would mean losing her stake in the business she originally financed. You’d think this would lead to the usual murder-the-husband scheme, but Hitt twists the plot the other direction when the husband approaches Danny and says that he wants Tawny to die or disappear.

So the question is who tries to kill who? Or maybe they both take a whack at homicide. We ain’t saying. In the end, though, you still have juicy adultery and a sinister murder plot. We’ve read a lot of books along those lines, often by better writers, but we’ve read them by worse writers too. In the hands of a top stylist Tawny might have been a real barnburner. As it is, we can call it readable but not special. The art on this Beacon Signal edition (it was also published by Softcover Library in 1969) is by an unknown, which is too bad because it’s one of the better covers on a Hitt novel. The far less tawny original painting appears below.