Take a photo of a barcode or cover
brandonpytel 's review for:
Black Wings Has My Angel
by Elliott Chaze
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.