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left_coast_justin 's review for:
Black Wings Has My Angel
by Elliott Chaze
It's rare for me to abandon a book when I'm 80% finished with it, but...well....a better book came along and I realized I just wasn't invested in the story.
I don't blame the page-by-page writing, which was crisp, professional and efficient, but rather the characters. Noir is supposed to celebrate the bleaker aspects of human nature; I get that. But C.W. Shugrue in The Last Good Kiss or Travis McGee actually care about something, and are stuck in my head as a result. In this book, we spend nearly all of our time with only two people, and all either of them care about is money, which does not really work for me.
I do appreciate some of the sly humor of the author's, a newspaper editor. Here he makes fun of his colleagues and profession:
If something better hadn't come along, I'd have probably finished this. It's a well-written example of the genre, but doesn't advance it in any way.
I don't blame the page-by-page writing, which was crisp, professional and efficient, but rather the characters. Noir is supposed to celebrate the bleaker aspects of human nature; I get that. But C.W. Shugrue in The Last Good Kiss or Travis McGee actually care about something, and are stuck in my head as a result. In this book, we spend nearly all of our time with only two people, and all either of them care about is money, which does not really work for me.
I do appreciate some of the sly humor of the author's, a newspaper editor. Here he makes fun of his colleagues and profession:
I remember in one bar down the street from the Denver Post there were six or eight newspapermen at the bar, loading up between additions. You can spot them anywhere. They talk in headlines and they drink gravely and their faces are clean and their fingernails full of carbon. They have many private jokes. They are about the only people I know who are the same out of college as in college, in small towns and big ones.
If something better hadn't come along, I'd have probably finished this. It's a well-written example of the genre, but doesn't advance it in any way.