Black Wings Has My
Angel (aka One For The Money) is one of the most legendary of the early original novels
published by Gold Medal Books (in this case in 1953), when Gold Medal
was the acme of the pulp paperback lists, and just a few pages in you
can see why. The narrator is washing off four months worth of
roughnecking on an Atchafalaya River when the hooker is delivered to
his room in a cheap hotel in a cheaper town called Krotz Springs.
She's a looker, and even he can see she's well beneath her class in
Krotz Springs. And when he makes a joke she says, 'Never joke with a
tired tramp. No one gets as tired as a tired tramp.' It's love, or
something like it, at first sight.
He tries to leave her
behind, and she tries to leave him, even taking his money, but they
cannot stay apart He calls himself Timothy Sunblade, and she's
Virginia but the names don't matter, except as metaphor, because
neither person is what their names say they are. He's got a plan, for
a big heist in Denver, and eventually she comes along for the ride,
and they shack up in a suburban tract house, playing young marrieds
while he cases the job and sets it up.
This has everything
there is to love about noir and pulp. The terms are often misused and
confused for each other, but here the mix of the elements is
perfect: the inevitability of bad luck and fate is as powerful as
Greek tragedy, but the characters are out of the darkness beneath
that post-war American dream. When Chaze sticks them into 50s
suburbia, it's like pouring acid into a volatile mix about to
explode. And it does. The only thing worse than waiting for the job
to happen, and risking the murder that goes with it, and the betrayal
that lurks within the natures of these characters, the only thing
worse than that is having the job succeed, and then trying to live
out your dreams, knowing the nightmares that were tailing you are
still on your tail.
Chaze's prose is
relentless, delivered in a first-person narration with surprising
sensitivity to nuance, but with no gift-wrapping of the narrator's
own character. In best pulp fiction mode, he's rendered almost
helpless by Virginia's femme fatale, but he's the master of his own
fate to some degree, and that is precisely the degree to which he
cannot escape from his desire for her. It ends as you might expect,
with storms and a mine shaft down which dreams plummet to their
death. Compulsive reading.
Black Wings Has My
Angel (b/w One Is A Lonely Number by Bruce Elliott)
Stark House 2012,
$19.95 ISBN 9781933586434
1 comment :
I live in the Hattiesburg MS area. The Hattiesburg American was part of our daily life. When Elliot worked for the American I read every article by him and loved them. I have always loved to read and someway missed his book Black Wings. I was searching for someones hometown in LA. and saw Elliot was from there also and it told about his book. I ordered it. loved it and now am passing it around to friends in my book club. I regret he didn't live to see this but now is the time for his talent to be shown to the world
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