Wed 15 Apr 2020
A 1001 Midnights Review: ELLIOT CHAZE – Black Wings Has My Angel.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[7] Comments
by Max Allan Collins
ELLIOT CHAZE – Black Wings Has My Angel. Gold Medal #296, paperback original, 1953. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2012 (published with One Is a Lonely Number by Bruce Elliott) New York Review of Books, trade paperback, 2016. Reprnited earlier as One for the Money (Berkley Y658, paperback, 1962).
The reputation of Black Wings Has My Angel as the quintessential Gold Medal paperback is deserved. It has everything that made these originals so good: a fast-moving story, sex, and fine descriptive writing.
Escaped con Tim Sunblade (an alias chosen after his jailbreak, “because it smells of the out of doors”) is resting up after rough-necking on a drilling rig. In a small hotel in a little fishing village on the Atchafayala, he encounters Virginia, a beautiful prostitute whose $!0-a-night fee causes him to guess rightly that she, too, is keeping a low profile; soon he finds she is a high-priced call girl on the run. Virginia seems aloof, even cold, but the two pair off.
When Tim tries to ditch her. only to discover she has anticipated him and stolen his money, they reteam and Virginia’s passion bubbles to the surface. Camping out in the mountains in Colorado, Tim decides Virginia has what it takes to help him pull off an armored-car job. They move to Denver and set up a respectable front,. renting a house, Tim working another hard labor job, as the robbery is meticulously planned, and then carried out.
Bu1 Chaze’s antihero 1s too complex to be described simply as amoral; his immoral deeds haunt him in a manner an amoral individual would shrug off. A murder he’s committed calls at him as he and Virginia slide into a rich, decadent life-style in New Orleans. Soon Tim is pulled obsessively into his respectable past, for a brief, violent layover in his small hometown, before the couple ride out an even deeper, darker compulsion: to look into a certain abandoned mine shaft, to stare into the darkness that is death.
Gold Medal originals were often James M. Cain pastiches, and Chaze’s novel is one of the best – far better than the novels Cain himself was writing at the time, Chaze’s bleak social satire – the working and upper classes arc shown to be equally venal – helps keep Tim’s actions understandable and even sympathetic. The swift, compelling, natural-sounding first-person narration is marked by quietly vivid images (“She was lying on the sleeping bag in the sun, as slim and bare as a sword”).
Black Wings Has My Angel (reprinted as One for the Money, Berkley, 1962) is an early work, and would seem to promise a major career in the genre for Chaze. But Cbaze, a newspaperman, has published novels only occasionally, and not always in the suspense field, In Chaze’s recent mystery series about newsman Kiel St. James, the promise of his Gold Medal original is not kept: Mr. Yesterday (1984) is haphazardly plotted, an unconvincing structure that collapses upon its interesting characters and well-drawn southern setting.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
April 15th, 2020 at 1:30 pm
Black Wings Has My Angel and One Is A lonely Number are both available on the Kindle as a set for $3.99. Black Wings sells for $.99 by itself.
April 15th, 2020 at 1:45 pm
Thanks, Chuck. There was a long period of time when this book was almost impossible to find, and when you did, unless you were very very lucky, you couldn’t afford it.
April 15th, 2020 at 4:02 pm
There’s also a 2016 edition from NYRB Classics. This was one of the late Bill Crider’s favorites. The first time I ever heard of it was via an article by Bill in a 1972 issue of MYSTERY READER’S NEWSLETTER about the (then) forgotten Gold Medal classics of the ’50s.
April 15th, 2020 at 4:39 pm
Yes, Bill was certainly a big fan of the entire Gold Medal line, at least through most of the 60s. He and I did a lot of correspondence back and forth about them, and back when M*F was a printed zine, he did a series of “Gold Medal Corner” columns about them. I think but am not sure if all of them have made it over the blog format.
April 15th, 2020 at 4:50 pm
The novel was also published in hardcover in England, under the title ONE FOR THE MONEY (Robert Hale, 1985).
April 15th, 2020 at 5:11 pm
Right you are, Bill, and I’ll wager you’re the only person in the US who has a copy. There are none available on abebooks.com right now, and only one of the Berkley reprint with the same title. The seller is only asking $75 for that one, but in barely fair condition.
April 15th, 2020 at 9:49 pm
The book could almost have been handed out to GM writers as a blueprint on how to write the perfect GOLD MEDAL novel.