Black Wings Has My Angel

“Baby, just about anywhere you die there’s somebody watching. It doesn’t make any difference whether they’re watching you die in bed or in a chair, somebody’s going to be there. It’s strictly a spectator sport.”

My first dip into noir will probably be my last—I just don’t think the grit and violence are really something I want to return to—but I can’t deny that I thoroughly enjoyed

Black Wings Has My Angel. I could hardly put it down.

Without knowing much about the genre, this novel seemed to have all the tropes I might have expected (and I don’t mean that in a bad way):

a heist, a police shootout, multiple murders, not one but

two prison breaks, fugitives on the run, a femme fatale, the hint of potential mob involvement (though this, somewhat disappointingly, does not materialize), a bad ending for all involved.

The plot is constantly rushing forward in a whirlwind of movement, from seedy motel rooms to backwoods camping to the suburbs to glamorous hotel suits. And there’s a

lot of sex and a

lot of violence, though I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t needlessly graphic, with the most explicit content happening “off-screen” or without much embellishment.

The two main characters, “Tim” and “Virginia”, are not good people, and their relationship is not healthy. That’s not to say they’re completely unsympathetic, but it does mean they’re not the kind of characters to unequivocally root for. But they

are transfixing; or, as Tim puts it towards the end of the novel when he is unable to look away from a reminder of the things he’s done, “

It was a blind disgust so intense, so very much of what it was, as to carry with it a terrible fascination. The ultimate in horror is, for some unworldly reason, attractive. Hypnotic.”

Which is another thing: the prose is excellent. It’s stark and spare but also vivid and emotive. The first-person narrative is used brilliantly, especially as the metanarrative becomes more clear as the story unfolds, which adds yet another layer to the story and provides an excellent opportunity for some light foreshadowing. In fact, Chaze’s foreshadowing is top-notch all-around, subtle but somehow still heightening the tension that is already almost as taught as it can get. Similarly, he does a great job of slowly revealing elements of Tim’s past that more fully inform his character. He never fully commits to a flashback, but instead interweaves small details into the story as it unfolds, which makes it feel incredibly real.

My one real complaint is that I really don’t like the ending—not what

happened, but how it was written.

Virginia’s accidental death felt both melodramatic and underwritten, and I simply didn’t buy Tim’s reaction. Some degree of shock is absolutely understandable, but he completely loses it in a way that doesn’t feel authentic to the character. At the very least, I think Chaze needed to do more to explain why he behaved the way he did.

Overall, I don’t at all doubt that

Black Wings Has My Angel is one of the best of its genre. I definitely enjoyed it, but ultimately I just don’t think the genre is to my taste.

Some favorite passages:

We turned around and headed again for Raton Pass, not stopping this time at Raton, but going on until the road widened and smoothed out for the long climb over the mountains and into Colorado. The trees got shorter and skinnier and the grass thinner. The air crisped and cooled despite the sunshine, which near the peak of the pass seemed almost to crackle among the rocks. These things registered with me because I am something of a fool about the outdoors. I feel the same way about the sky and clouds, and being able to move around, as an evangelist feels about religion. I guess freedom and the money to enjoy it are a kind of religion, a very exclusive kind.

Most of living is waiting to live. And you spend a great deal of time worrying about things that don’t matter and about people that don’t matter and all this is clear to you when you know the very day you’re going to die.

Because back there I never thought about how a man could die by the clock and calendar, ticking off the days and the minutes as if he were waiting to have a baby. When I thought of dying there was a lot of noise in it and then blackness, no different than any other blackness but more complete and lasting. The way I had it doped, dying was pretty stagy and certainly not lonely.

There was the damnedest sunset, smeared like sirup of opals over everything and dripping off the clouds the way the molten metal comes out of the ladle in a steel mill. It lit up Virginia’s face and filled the car with pink. She was reading the front page of the Pueblo newspaper again and I wondered how she could keep her mind on it in that fine sea of pinkness and with so much to look at outside the car.

A hundred yards up a crooked foot trail I found a fast shallow creek. Because of the wind you couldn’t hear it until you were right on it. The water was all purple and brass and silver in the moonlight.

By noon we were swimming together in the pool. She was wonderful in the water, almost professionally good, and the water was clear because its bottom was solid rock and there was nothing to stir up and cloud it. It must have been about nine feet deep and cold, achingly cold. It felt so fine to my head I’d take a deep breath and go limp and sink down to the bottom and squat there. From below the surface was a sheet of mercury and then I’d see it break roughly as she kicked against it coming down to me. It was like watching her through a sheet of clean green cellophane. She came and curved around me and slid along my back and shoulders. A futuristic kind of love. Love with all the heat taken out of it.

I’m telling this the way I remember it, and I explained to you before that some of the things that come back to me are little things that stick out of the story like sore thumbs and don’t serve any useful purpose. I’m trying to keep it true to life and real life is not a series of nice interlocking ripples graded for size and fitting into a pattern that can be called off like your ABC’s. It’s a bunch of foolish tiny things that don’t add one way or the other, except that they happened and passed the time.

I was going downtown to kill a man who hadn’t done a damned thing to me, to kill an old guy whose only fault as far as I knew was throwing chewing gum wrappers in the street. I was going to kill him because I wanted money more than I wanted him to live and I was going to kill him filthily. Or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe he was going to kill me and go on the rest of his life with the gum wrappers. I know now that I would have probably backed out of it if it hadn’t been for Virginia and the desire to remain a big bad lad in her eyes.

But no one’s immune to thinking. Try drawing a blank for any length of time, emptying your head of everything and still you land on a color, a shape, a personality, a grievance. I can sit here on this cot in my cell and stare at the plaster wall, go absolutely limp in my head, and the story, the story of Virginia and me is there in the plaster. At night in the dark it unreels very clearly even as I try to suck the darkness into my head hoping to blot the other out of there. Writing it down brings me no relief from thinking, but it does somehow take the curse off the blackest parts of it so that later when they flash on the screen inside me they do not burn me so, and I can say: I admitted I did it. I confessed it on a piece of paper. I never told any of it in the courtroom. I didn’t tell it before that when they strapped me over the car and used the burning cigars on me. I didn’t say anything. But I’ve put it all on the paper and the paper under my mattress and while it doesn’t get it out of me, it dilutes it.

Close to the shore, beyond the beach to the right of the highway, the Gulf was the color of dishwater. This faded into a pale crumpled green and amethyst and out farther, to turquoise. The sun lay over sand and water and highway, thick and warm as melted butter, and until I noticed this it hadn’t occurred to me how much time we’d killed in the hotel room arguing about leaving.

You’ve never heard a siren until you’ve heard one looking for you and you alone. Then you really hear it and know what it is and understand that the man who invented it was no man, but a fiend from hell who patched together certain sounds and blends of sounds in a way that would paralyze and sicken. You sit in your living room and hear a siren and it’s a small and lonesome thing and all it means to you is that you have to listen until it goes away. But when it is after you, it is the texture of the whole world. You will hear it until you die. It tears the guts out of you like a drill against a nerve and it moves into you and expands. I’m glad I’ll never have to listen to another siren. I’m glad no one will ever hunt for me again and that I’m finished with running and hearing them hunt me.

“Whenever I used to see married men jerking their lawful wedded wives in and out of cars and steering them down the sidewalks like wheelbarrows it tickled me,” she said. “There’s something so comical about that kind of possessiveness. Because you can’t own anybody by shielding them and bullying them and spying on them. It’s just the other way ’round.” “That’s not exactly a new idea.” “It’s not a popular one either.