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4.09 AVERAGE
4.09 AVERAGE
I am not much on noir but I enjoyed listening to this classic. The author was a local journalist which made it all the more interesting.
Pitch perfect pulp fiction. I’m no connaisseur of 50s pulp, but from what I’ve read this seems to me equal to the best, with above average writing. It’s certainly on a par with Jim Thompson, with the added benefit that Chaze seems more conscious of the artificiality of 50s pulp clichés. Not by avoiding them so much as by revelling in them, laying them on and putting them to good use.
Compared to the lean style of 30s pulp like Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? 50s pulp can sometimes sound rather melodramatic and childish in its insistence on violence and guns. At least that’s what I felt with authors like Thompson and Goodis. Chaze’s novel is no less melodramatic, but he seems to deploy the melodrama more consciously, and therefore more effectively. And as I said, the writing is really accomplished, and makes the book eminently quotable. Except that I find it hard to quote from it since I listened to the audio version... I don’t have a text to look up sentences that struck me.
Not ‘Great Literature’, but certainly riveting, entertaining and very well-written literature this is.
This was the first time I ‘read’ an audio book, and this 50s pulp style seems to lend itself particularly well to this type of consumption. Malcolm Hillgartner’s reading was very effective. It felt like listening to the voice-over of a 50s noir film. And that's exactly what it should sound like.
Compared to the lean style of 30s pulp like Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? 50s pulp can sometimes sound rather melodramatic and childish in its insistence on violence and guns. At least that’s what I felt with authors like Thompson and Goodis. Chaze’s novel is no less melodramatic, but he seems to deploy the melodrama more consciously, and therefore more effectively. And as I said, the writing is really accomplished, and makes the book eminently quotable. Except that I find it hard to quote from it since I listened to the audio version... I don’t have a text to look up sentences that struck me.
Not ‘Great Literature’, but certainly riveting, entertaining and very well-written literature this is.
This was the first time I ‘read’ an audio book, and this 50s pulp style seems to lend itself particularly well to this type of consumption. Malcolm Hillgartner’s reading was very effective. It felt like listening to the voice-over of a 50s noir film. And that's exactly what it should sound like.
Noir perfection. The gorgeous dame with a heart of ice, check. The tough-but-smart-but-brutal protagonist, check. The audacious plan, check. Things going horribly sour, check. Wonderful hard-boiled writing, check. Terrific all around.
Think noir fiction, with a daring robbery thrown into the mix. This novel was originally published in 1953, and then went out of print to be resurrected by NYRB. Similar to the 1972 Steve McQueen film The Getaway. Tim Sunblade is an ex-con who has escaped from prison, Virginia is a woman also on the run (think 1950s era Kim Basinger). The author, Chaze, was a long time reporter at AP and at various newspapers. There are some great noir-ish sentences and an eye for details. (4.0-4.2/5.0 stars).
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture
A novel fully deserving of its status as a cult classic, this is a masterpiece of noir fiction. Tense and crackling with irony wrapped in tight prose...they just don't write books like this any more. The pacing is breakneck, but never at the expense of character. Just the right play of shadow and light, highlighting the demons haunting the main characters and the terrible, brutal cost of crime.
First published in 1953, the NYRB is reissuing it. Read more here: http://www.nyrb.com/products/black-wings-has-my-angel?variant=2202485569
Highly recommended for those who enjoy noir.
First published in 1953, the NYRB is reissuing it. Read more here: http://www.nyrb.com/products/black-wings-has-my-angel?variant=2202485569
Highly recommended for those who enjoy noir.
What a smart, thrilling little gem of a book — one that is as much Hemingway as it is Jim Thomson, a sort of haunting portrait of a killer on the run, with simple, beautiful passages of the Western United States in between, but also some great introspective lines about life and freedom.
“Most of living is waiting toi live. And you spend a great deal of time worrying about things that don’t matter and about people that don’t matter and all this is clear to you when you know the very day you’re going to die.”
Our narrator, call him Tim or Kenneth, just broke out of prison, losing the mastermind behind the escape, Jeepie, in the process. Still, Tim is determined to carry out the second part of Jeepie’s big plan: Robbing an armored truck. The problem is that it’s a two-person job.
Enter Virginia, a tramp that Tim picks up somewhere on the road, a sort of enigma: “Nothing seemed to surprise her: the car, the tags, the business of taking an uncharted trip with an unknown man.”
At first, she's disposable; but then, she becomes something more… at first, still disposable, or at least ditchable, and then maybe killable? Yet she weaves her way into the plot, as Tim falls in love with her, and then we truly know she’s going to be along for the ride.
Throughout the book we get more insight on the escape and the coming robbery. We learn more of Jeepie and his perspective on life: “People are no damned good. Get yours, boy, while there’s some left. And get it while you’re young enough to live it up.” Which sort of becomes Tim’s philosophy as well.
And, “If your life can hang from a chewing gum wrapper it can hang from anything in the book. It can hang from a bullet no bigger than a bean, or from a cigarette smoked in bed,... Life is a rental proposition with no lease.”
And then we get what makes good thrillers good thrillers: the constant push and pull of morality, intersecting with our humanistic instinct to avoid killing.
“I was going downtown to kill a man who hadn’t done a damned thing to me, to kill an old guy whose only fault as far as I knew was throwing chewing gum wrappers on the street. I was going to kill him because I wanted money more than I wanted him to live and I was going to kill him filthily.”
To add another element, always there is Virginia: “I would have probably backed out of it if it hadn’t been for Virginia and the desire to remain a big bad lad in her eyes.”
But this layered morality doesn’t slow the plot at all; it adds a certain depth to it that can be absent from dime-store thrillers. Black Wings Has My Angel is a page-turning element that is inherent in classics.
Even though we know how it’s going to end, Chaze adds enough drama, enough twists and turns, escapes and murders that we can only finally exhale after the book reaches its inevitable conclusion.
Pour some bourbon, light a cigarette, and lean back in the leather chair, because it’s that type of book.
“Most of living is waiting toi live. And you spend a great deal of time worrying about things that don’t matter and about people that don’t matter and all this is clear to you when you know the very day you’re going to die.”
Our narrator, call him Tim or Kenneth, just broke out of prison, losing the mastermind behind the escape, Jeepie, in the process. Still, Tim is determined to carry out the second part of Jeepie’s big plan: Robbing an armored truck. The problem is that it’s a two-person job.
Enter Virginia, a tramp that Tim picks up somewhere on the road, a sort of enigma: “Nothing seemed to surprise her: the car, the tags, the business of taking an uncharted trip with an unknown man.”
At first, she's disposable; but then, she becomes something more… at first, still disposable, or at least ditchable, and then maybe killable? Yet she weaves her way into the plot, as Tim falls in love with her, and then we truly know she’s going to be along for the ride.
Throughout the book we get more insight on the escape and the coming robbery. We learn more of Jeepie and his perspective on life: “People are no damned good. Get yours, boy, while there’s some left. And get it while you’re young enough to live it up.” Which sort of becomes Tim’s philosophy as well.
And, “If your life can hang from a chewing gum wrapper it can hang from anything in the book. It can hang from a bullet no bigger than a bean, or from a cigarette smoked in bed,... Life is a rental proposition with no lease.”
And then we get what makes good thrillers good thrillers: the constant push and pull of morality, intersecting with our humanistic instinct to avoid killing.
“I was going downtown to kill a man who hadn’t done a damned thing to me, to kill an old guy whose only fault as far as I knew was throwing chewing gum wrappers on the street. I was going to kill him because I wanted money more than I wanted him to live and I was going to kill him filthily.”
To add another element, always there is Virginia: “I would have probably backed out of it if it hadn’t been for Virginia and the desire to remain a big bad lad in her eyes.”
But this layered morality doesn’t slow the plot at all; it adds a certain depth to it that can be absent from dime-store thrillers. Black Wings Has My Angel is a page-turning element that is inherent in classics.
Even though we know how it’s going to end, Chaze adds enough drama, enough twists and turns, escapes and murders that we can only finally exhale after the book reaches its inevitable conclusion.
Pour some bourbon, light a cigarette, and lean back in the leather chair, because it’s that type of book.
This is the second time I've read Black Wings Has My Angel (1953) by Elliott Chaze. The first 80% of the book is classic-noir-crime-fiction. I felt though that the last 20% of the book got a little hazy. That would be when Tim\Kenneth gets thrown in jail in his home town for...0pps, no spoilers. But I felt that from this point on till the end the story rode off the rails and even dipped a toe in the fantastic...or a dream-like haze. I'd give some concrete reasons why I felt this way, but...no spoilers. Heck, maybe author Chaze wanted to do some fancy writing ala Faulkner, both being from Mississippi. BUT, overall I really enjoyed reading Black Wings and the very end (last page) does hold together and I understand why it has reached it classic status...3.5 outta 5.0...I'll bump it up to 4.0...-There is a very good article about both the book and the author, Elliott Chaze, called "One of the Great Unsung Crime Novels of the 20th Century " by Barry Gifford that I highly recommend reading after finishing the book.
Goodreads friend William Donelson boldly asserts this isn’t a novel to be read; this is a novel to be felt and a novel to be lived. After my own experience with Elliott Chaze's noir black angel, feeling its dramatic intensity and living through every single page with narrator Tim Sunblade and his beautiful babe Virginia, the slender, poised gal with skin the color of pearls melted in honey, I couldn’t agree more. In order to do such a powerful, complex book a measure of justice, a book spilling its guts out in insatiable greed, voracious gluttony, self-indulgent lusts and a ravenous craving for freedom and thrills, please read on.
Tim Sunblade, the name he takes on as his tribute to a love of the great outdoors, is not only a big hunk of a good-looking tough-guy but a World War Two vet who served in the Pacific and still carries a piece of metal lodged in his skull. Tim is also an escaped convict from a Mississippi penitentiary, having been sent there in the first place after a tongue-thrashing by an FBI agent about making off with other people’s cars.
Picture a man in 1953 who slapped down his quarters and dimes at the corner drug store for a copy of this recently published Gold Medal paperback. Chances are such a man was himself a war veteran and knew the intensity and toughness of battle and might even have had his own brush with the law. All this to say, a reader back then felt an immediate kinship with big, tough, adventurous Tim Sunblade when he spoke to men as intimates, addressing them directly, as in “Virginia had told me – did I tell you her name was Virginia?" and "You hear and read about legs. But when you see the really good ones, you know the things you read and heard where a lot of trash."
Although we discover Tim’s real name along the way, no compelling reason to mention it here since Tim would like nothing more than to shove his past identity in an incinerator, watch it go up in smoke and be done with it forever. However, it is worth mentioning, wartime and jail-time gave Tim added layers of toughness beyond the likes of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Hammett’s Sam Spade and Cain’s Walter Huff. And since so much of noir revolves around violence, crime and the rough and tumble, this is one good reason to judge Black Wings Has My Angel, by far Elliott Chaze’s best novel, as a king of noir.
Looking at the bigger picture, there’s no question all the returning veterans with their wartime experiences made a serious impact on American society and Tim Sunblade gave voice to what these men faced as civilians in postwar America. And if men supporting a wife and kids by working a dead-end job at the local factory or office or warehouse couldn’t have their own Tim Sunblade-style adventures, at least they could read Chaze’s novel and live through Sunblade vicariously. Additionally, Black Wings can be read as a keen social commentary on the state of how American character and mythology played itself out during the 1950s in the home of the brave.
Right up front in Chapter 3 Mississippi born and bred Tim gives us a little foreshadowing by getting down to some good old boy Southern philosophizing, telling us how facing death at his twenty-seven years isn’t that much different from dying as an old man since life, real life, is all about forgetting all the junk and living and remembering the delicious moments, and he has had plenty of delicious, luscious moments with Virginia. In this way, the stark reality and blackness of death coats every page we read from this point forward like ugly on an ape (cliché, I know, but in Tim's case it works).
Tim Sunblade is a rebel with a cause and his rebellion is against staleness, routine and depending on anyone other than himself. Ah, the American myth of the self-made man, standing without any props, standing strong and tall. Here are Tim’s reflection on his knock-out, sexy babe as he speeds along the highway under an open sky: “I was all for dumping her along the way in a day or so. Now I didn’t know for sure, but I still thought I would, because a woman had no place in my plans.” Even as Tim’s heart pounds with more and more love for Virginia, all the rest of him screams for boundless freedom.
Oh, Virginia! You femme fatale! Tim’s gorgeous lady is a study in contrasts, as refined and elegant as Lauren Bacall but with a wild-crazy-mad streak a mile long. Here she is after a successful big-time, masterful robbery: “She was scooping up handfuls of the green money and dropping it on top of her head so that it came sliding down along the cream-colored hair, slipping down along her shoulders and body. She was making a noise I never heard come out of a human being. It was a scream that was a whisper with a laugh that was a cry. Over and Over. The noise and the scooping. The slippery, sliding bills against her rigid body.”
Interestingly, it was exactly the above scene that made the deepest impression on prepubescent Jean-Patrick Manchette, the author who would revitalize French crime fiction in the 1970s and have his slim, athletic, fetching thirty-year-old Aimée Joubert in Fatale take a bath with her own stolen bills. Black Wings, a serious novel with serious influence, and New York Review Books (NYRB)'s republication provides a great service in bringing this classic to a wider audience. The NYRB edition also includes a colorful introductory essay by Barry Gifford.
“Virginia was in bed, all frou-froued up in a pink robe with some kind of white fur around the collar. The fur was so silky the air-conditioning made it move. She was eating a thick cube of a kind of candy they call Heavenly Hash in New Orleans, and now and again she took a straight raw sip of bourbon and turned the page of her book.” Did I mention greed, gluttony, lust, freedom and thrills? Black Wings is dripping with it. And since Virginia is such an huge part of each and every chapter, Elliott Chaze’s two hundred page angel is supercharged, a book that can be enjoyed nowadays by both men and women (I mention this since men were definitely the target audience back in 1953).
Lastly, I’d like to extend an especial thank to my Goodreads friend William Donelson for his own inspiring review. If you liked reading my review, you will love reading his – link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1986503201?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
