Black Wings Has My Angel

If I had a favorite category of genre fiction it would be mysteries, and more specifically over the past few years, mid-century noir. I’ve written before about Dorothy B. Hughes — have you read The Expendable Man yet? You should. And also about David Goodis, here and here.

Last week I found a new favorite — Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliot Chaze, originally published in 1953. It came on my radar because I saw the NYRB reissue — but then found a Dover edition available for checkout via the online library app, Hoopla.

Mysteries and noir appeal to me for many reasons. When you can find one with good writing — it’s good. The language is precise, the observations are sharp and the reflections insightful. They’re quick and easy to read. But they also turn on aspects of human life that interest me, that strike me as essential to understand: namely the role of the accident, the random event, the serendipitous meeting and the deep, life-long impact of all of them, putting us on twisting roads to which we were certain we had the map.

And they also tend to put something else very important in our sights: the choice.

Sometimes the drama of these stories hinges on the simple propulsion of events that we follow, ripping through pages simply driven to see how it will all turn out.

But in the tales with lasting impact, we meet characters who are confronted with choices, and usually it is, in the midst of complicated situations, a fairly simple choice when you get down to it: Should I do the wrong thing again? Or do I have it in me to do the right thing this time?

Skipping decades and genres, this was a great deal of the appeal of both The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul to me. Much is made, in all of those shows, of the centrality of the anti-hero and a few gallons of ink was spilled writing hand-wringing essays wondering What Have We Come To when the mafia boss, the meth-maker and the shyster lawyer are heroes with fan pages and amusing memes dedicated to them?

(You can add other characters from other shows I’ve never watched, I’m sure.)

But while yes, there are idiots who cheer on their misdeeds, for me and I suspect many others, the persistent appeal was the questions: Will they do the right thing, this time? Ever? Will they recognize the possibility of redemption and change?

And so it is with much of the noir I seem to fall into. That same question, that same tension, that same hope.

So let’s get to Black Wings Has My Angel.

First, briefly: it’s really good. I mean — excellent. Propulsive, perceptive and intriguing. I’m not going to go through the whole plot because, well… spoilers!

I’ll be lazy and simply quote from a review of the reissue from the NPR website:

The novel opens with Tim relaxing in a hotel room, having just completed a stint as a roughneck on a drilling rig on the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana. He’s asked the bellhop to locate him some female companionship for the night, and he’s pleasantly surprised when the porter shows up with beautiful Virginia, a blonde with lavender eyes and a sassy attitude. Tim and Virginia decide to ditch the small town and go west. It turns out the two have a lot of common, include a love of money. “There’s no bad money,” Virginia tells Tim. “But, darling, you’ve got to have drifts of it, lumps of it, and little piles of it only make you sick and petty.” Tim has money on his mind, too — he’s planning to execute a daring heist, and he doesn’t want Virginia in his way. “But I still planned to leave her in the ladies john of some filling station,” he explains. “Because you can’t kiss your way out of prison and I knew that for sure. For dead sure.”

But he just can’t quit Virginia, and he needs a partner for his heist. So the two make their way to Colorado, first camping by an abandoned mineshaft, then pretending to be a married couple in suburban Denver while Tim plans his ambitious theft. And that’s when the fun — so to speak — begins. It doesn’t take too long for things to go south and the blood to start spilling.

There’s a lot of social observation and commentary sprinkled throughout the book — on the nature of work, on the toll that thankless work takes on human beings, on love and lust.

Before I get my primary takeaway from the novel, some good passages:

A fly strutted around the rim of my empty glass, a purplish fly with a back that changed color like the plumes in a rooster’s tail. Those things come back especially sharp, clearer than the way she looked or the way I felt.

“Out West all the smells are sucked up out of the baked land by the sun. And it’s as if all the colors in the ground are gobbled up by their sunsets, and so is the blue of the sky. The sky is high and pale and impersonal and you get the feeling it doesn’t belong to you at all, but that it is the property of the chamber of commerce. In the South the sky is humid and low and rich and it’s yours to smell and feel. In the West you’re only an observer. In the West someone sees a flower growing on a mountain and he writes a whole damned pamphlet about it. In the South the roses explode out of the weeds in the yards of the poorest shanties. Blood red ones.

“But about the gentleman thing.” She waved her glass. “I want to make it plain as the nose on your face. I can stand anything in the book but gentlemen. Because I’ve spent a lot of time, too much time with them, and I know why gentlemen are what they are. They decide to be that way after they’ve tried all the real things and flopped at them. They’ve flopped at women. They’ve flopped at standing up on their hind legs and acting like men. So they become gentlemen. They’ve flopped at being individuals. So they say to themselves one fine morning: ‘What can I be that’s no trouble at all and that doesn’t amount to a damned thing, but yet will make everyone look up to me?’ The answer’s simple. Be a gentleman. Take life flat on your back, cry in private, and then in a well-modulated voice.”

On journalists (the character is in a bar, watching a group of them):

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 bout the only people I know who are the same out of college as in college, in small towns and big ones.

I really enjoyed that observation.

These were things I thought of as I sat on the mezzanine of the St. Charles and looked down at the lobby through the ironwork, waiting for night. It seems that when you’re rich you do a lot of waiting for night, since daylight is neither sophisticated nor secretive and is more or less devoted to perspiring and recovering.

On my favorite theme:

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, or a bad breakfast that causes the doctor to sew the absorbent cotton inside you. From a slick tire tread or the hiccups or from kissing the wrong woman. Life is a rental proposition with no lease. For everybody, tall and short, muscles and fat, white and yellow, rich and poor. I know that now. And it is good to know at a time like this.

There are others, but they hinge on the plot and…. no spoilers.

The whole book is a heady, spiraling concoction of best-laid plans, built on great and startling scenes — ranging from unrelenting police brutality to the lives of useless young wealthy folk in New Orleans:

They worked so hard art being individuals. Eddie wore a green canvas rain hat everywhere he went, even with formal clothes, and he looked like an exhausted cat peering out from under a collard leaf….

I mean…can you beat that last image?

…to one of my absolutely favorite elements: Tim and Virginia find themselves held in a Mississippi jail, separated by a few cells so they can’t communicate without the other prisoner and guard overhearing. On occasion, a preacher comes in to minister to them, and part of that ministry involves getting them to sing hymns. He’s loud and clueless and absorbed in his own voice, so Virginia uses the moments to communicate a plan to Tim via singing it along with the hymn tune.

But in the end, what was most thought provoking to me about this novel is the deep-running, usually subtle theme of the deep damage of war and its attendant trauma. For Tim is a veteran of the War in the Pacific and was in fact held in a Japanese prison camp for almost three years.

That just might take its toll. It just might do some damage — all of it. From what you were commanded to do to other human beings on the battlefield, for the sake of God and country, from what you suffered and saw in that camp from the hands of other human beings, from the shock to the system of going from that to the predictable, routine even dull life back home?

That would mess with your head, and even with your soul. It can render you both overly sensitive and calloused at the same time. It can explode your moral sense and make you even more aware of the cost of evil all at once. It deepens your ties to others and also leaves you feeling deeply, and ultimately alone.

As I read Black Wings Has My Angel, that’s what I kept running up against, time and time again, and I had to wonder what Elliot Chaze, a veteran himself, was giving me a glimpse of through this knotty, dark, tragic journey.

( Note: You may be wondering….has this ever been filmed? By the French, yes, and it’s apparently terrible, but not by an American filmmaker yet — but not for want of trying — here’s an outline of the attempt of one filmmaker to put it on screen.)

Originally published at http://amywelborn.wordpress.com on November 14, 2020.