[In the following review, Hutchings says that Between Us Girls is noteworthy only as a minor addition to Orton's body of work.]

Written in 1957 and now published for the first time over thirty years after the author's death, Between Us Girls is the first novel that Joe Orton wrote independently of his mentor, lover, and eventual murderer Kenneth Halliwell. Its three-part picaresque plot parodies the familiar chorus-girl-to-movie-star story line of countless film and stage extravaganzas; its narrator, Susan Hope, begins in the chorus of London's Rainier Revuebar, is transported through the White Slave Trade to a brothel in Mareposa, Mexico, soon escapes from there, and establishes herself in Hollywood, where eventually (of course) she becomes a star.

The novel is written in the form of Susan's diary, with its tone echoing Confidential, Photoplay, and other such then-popular magazines. Yet, as in the articles whose “teaser” titles adorned their lurid covers (and indeed, as in the old peepshow arcade machines from which the title of Orton's final play What the Butler Saw was derived), the “confided” content of Between Us Girls proves to be far less sensational than the reader might be led to expect. Although the narrative is enlivened by glimpses of exotic and erotic demimondes that were not then current in serious fiction, surprisingly little is actually “revealed”: at the Soho strip club, for example, “Düsseldorf's own Countess Sirie von Blumenghast” displays her “eighteen sensational poses never seen before,” but Orton's description of the Mexican brothel and the goings-on therein is surprisingly demure. There, as in Jean Genet's play The Balcony, unusual costumes are apparently de rigueur and the police are prominent among the clientele, but the rampant and exuberant sexual transgressiveness of Orton's later work is undeveloped here, with Susan often seeming as naïve as Voltaire's Candide. Intermittently, diary entries are identified by the day of the week but never the date or year, and this convention is abandoned midway through the novel; the final segments reveal Susan Hope to be considerably older than in previous sections; but if, like Defoe's Moll Flanders, she has settled down after her wilder days of youth, now comfortable at last in prosperity and/or propriety, she spares the reader any moralizing about it.

The polished phrasing that characterizes Orton's later work is only occasionally evident here: a character's attire “shone with vulgarity,” and another is described as “a creature with beige-colored skin who … stared at me out of eyes which crawled from beneath wrinkled lids like uneasy snails.” There is also evidence of his fondness for parodying popular culture: on the first page Susan has just purchased a romance novel entitled The Divine Marquisé, and she eventually stars in the film version of it. Accordingly, the section of Between Us Girls that is set in Hollywood is the most comical in the book.

Francesca Coppa's thirty-page introduction to the novel provides a useful overview of Orton's career and includes a chronology of his life. Between Us Girls is of interest almost solely because it is Joe Orton's, however, and any new fragment of his work will be welcomed by his many devotees, ever eager to learn more about his too-short life and literary career. Had it been by an unknown author, however, the novel would attract scant attention, in the unlikely event that it had been published at all.