Black Wings Has My Angel (Audible Audio Edition) Elliott Chaze Malcolm Hillgartner Inc Blackstone Audio Books
Download As PDF : Black Wings Has My Angel (Audible Audio Edition) Elliott Chaze Malcolm Hillgartner Inc Blackstone Audio Books
She had the face of a madonna and a heart of dollar bills.
"I came back and searched dizzily under the trailer, muttering the way drunks do, and then I heard it. A shuffling around inside the trailer. The little tramp had knocked me in the head with her Southern Comfort and now she was in there loading up....She didn't know I was alive."
A legend among noir buffs, Chaze's long-lost pulp classic is the dreamlike tale of a man after a jailbreak who meets up with the woman of his dreams - and his nightmares.
Elliott Chaze (1915 - 1990) was an old-school newspaper man who began his journalism career with the New Orleans bureau of the Associated Press shortly before Pearl Harbor. He worked for a time for AP's Denver office after paratrooper service in World War II, and then migrated south to Mississippi where he spent 20 years as a reporter and award-winning columnist. He is the author of several novels.
Black Wings Has My Angel (Audible Audio Edition) Elliott Chaze Malcolm Hillgartner Inc Blackstone Audio Books
This is one of the very best -- perhaps the best -- of the noir crime novels in American letters, and much more than a crime story, but a psychological study of two very interesting people.It has recently been re-published by NYRB Classics in both paperback and Kindle editions: see Black Wings Has My Angel .n
It fully deserves that honor and one can only hope that it will reach a much broader audience. (This edition has been carefully edited so that the many typographical errors in this Kindle version and in the earlier paperback editions have been corrected. Personally, I found the typos rather charming, consistent with the pulp crime magazines and paperbacks of my young adulthood. But the sanitized version is still wonderful and well worth purchasing.)
Others have described the plot and the characters as well or better than I can. For me, this is a book to read and re-read with great pleasure, and I concur completely with Barry Gifford who wrote the Forward to this edition:
"When I was the editor of Black Lizard Books between 1984 and 1989, the one novel I wanted most to publish in the series was Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel. The book was brought to my attention by Edward Gorman and Max Collins, both of whom had written admiringly about it. I read it and was floored. Black Wings was an astonishingly well-written literary novel that just happened to be about (or roundabout) a crime. It was a perfect fit for what the publisher and I were doing at Black Lizard, putting out books that were psychologically provocative, on the edge, and, more often than not, over the edge. Our authors—among them Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis—were uncompromising, cruel, crazy, sexy, and daring. Chaze’s novel, published originally in 1954 and since then widely available only in French translation, was to be a kind of crowning achievement for Black Lizard. Unfortunately, before we could publish it, the company was sold and the editors who inherited the series deemed Black Wings unworthy of publication."
Read any version; you may be "floored" as well.
Robert C. Ross
January 2016
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Black Wings Has My Angel (Audible Audio Edition) Elliott Chaze Malcolm Hillgartner Inc Blackstone Audio Books Reviews
Before this book, I had never read noir before. I do not know where this stands with others of its genre, but I'm willing to bet it's at the top of the list! I love that I know the fate of the characters near the beginning, and I love that the language was so rich and delightful that I looked forward to the journey to find out the details.
Some of the rich (non-spoiler) prose you'll find in this book
"You hear and read about legs. But when you see the really good ones, you know the things you read and heard were a lot of trash."
"Having her at the wheel gave me a good feeling. She kept the left front fender pasted to the center stripe of the road, grooving it as if it were a rail."
"He wore a shirt with genuine French cuffs and he was so proud of them he kept shooting them out of his jacket sleeves and glancing at them as if they were a perpetual and pleasant surprise to him."
You're not going to regret the pleasure of reading this book!
Periodically, I sift through the growing list of books published by the New York Review of Books imprint. For whatever reason, this one has caught my eye a few times so when it appeared for 99 cents on , I nabbed it.
I've not scratched the surface of the noir genre, The Maltese Falcon being the only other example I remember reading. That said, I enjoyed this on its own merits. I guess all the boilerplate language in the NYRB blurb is accurate hard-boiled, brutal, dark. And Chaze's writing is fine.
But what distinguishes it, perhaps, is that the first person narrator, escaped convict Tim Sunblade, seems occasionally like a man-child. Through the twists of the violent, co-dependent affair between Tim and his femme-fatale, Virginia, we catch glimpses of a small-town boy longing for home. This explodes into full view late in the book, to disastrous effect. It's a nice touch and hints at a sort of innocence absent in the likes of Sam Spade.
Perhaps a more discerning noir reader would recognize this as a trope? Still, even if I don't love the genre, I'd recommend this book.
The story begins with our hero (villain) leaving his job drilling oil. The boss is nothing but compliments promising a promotion the following year. Only gradually through the story do you realize that he is really an escaped convict that needed to earn enough money to pull off a big heist. He's not going back to any square job when he's got one of those plans for easy street. The femme fatal is a too beautiful for the boonies hooker that our protagonist cannot quit. She is not exactly the cause of his problems but a symptom of his overall poor judgment. The story takes us to places like Cripple Creek, Colorado, Denver, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The distinguishing feature of the book is its darkness. I tried to think if I had read any books published before this that matched the bleakness and I could only come up with They Shoot Horses Don't They by Horace McCoy (1935). Jim Thompson would get even bleaker with a similar story to this in The Getaway (1958). The unpublished until 2010, Memory, by Donald Westlake also comes to mind. I prefer all three to this tale. I think that is because bleakness is the main characteristic rather than an attribute. There is also something about the main character that never seems quite real to me. For a short book I found myself daydreaming and losing attention at times. And yet what a movie this could have made with Robert Mitchum and Lana Turner.
This is one of the very best -- perhaps the best -- of the noir crime novels in American letters, and much more than a crime story, but a psychological study of two very interesting people.
It has recently been re-published by NYRB Classics in both paperback and editions see Black Wings Has My Angel .n
It fully deserves that honor and one can only hope that it will reach a much broader audience. (This edition has been carefully edited so that the many typographical errors in this version and in the earlier paperback editions have been corrected. Personally, I found the typos rather charming, consistent with the pulp crime magazines and paperbacks of my young adulthood. But the sanitized version is still wonderful and well worth purchasing.)
Others have described the plot and the characters as well or better than I can. For me, this is a book to read and re-read with great pleasure, and I concur completely with Barry Gifford who wrote the Forward to this edition
"When I was the editor of Black Lizard Books between 1984 and 1989, the one novel I wanted most to publish in the series was Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel. The book was brought to my attention by Edward Gorman and Max Collins, both of whom had written admiringly about it. I read it and was floored. Black Wings was an astonishingly well-written literary novel that just happened to be about (or roundabout) a crime. It was a perfect fit for what the publisher and I were doing at Black Lizard, putting out books that were psychologically provocative, on the edge, and, more often than not, over the edge. Our authors—among them Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis—were uncompromising, cruel, crazy, sexy, and daring. Chaze’s novel, published originally in 1954 and since then widely available only in French translation, was to be a kind of crowning achievement for Black Lizard. Unfortunately, before we could publish it, the company was sold and the editors who inherited the series deemed Black Wings unworthy of publication."
Read any version; you may be "floored" as well.
Robert C. Ross
January 2016
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