mikerickson reviewed Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze
-
3 stars
I feel like every noir I've ever read has fallen into one of two categories: 1) a private detective accepts a job that ends up being way more complicated than he bargained for, or 2) a man-woman duo in a love-hate relationship commit a crime, get away with it for a little bit, and then ultimately pay a tragic price. This was an archetypical example of the latter.
Our protagonist is a WWII vet-turned-escaped convict on the run from the FBI. He hires a call girl for a night and realizes she just might be wild and desperate and jaded enough to help him run a heist he'd been planning with another guy while he was in jail, so they skip town together and start getting to work. Their dynamic was extremely hot and cold, ranging from extended evenings of lovemaking to scenes where I genuinely thought one of them …
I feel like every noir I've ever read has fallen into one of two categories: 1) a private detective accepts a job that ends up being way more complicated than he bargained for, or 2) a man-woman duo in a love-hate relationship commit a crime, get away with it for a little bit, and then ultimately pay a tragic price. This was an archetypical example of the latter.
Our protagonist is a WWII vet-turned-escaped convict on the run from the FBI. He hires a call girl for a night and realizes she just might be wild and desperate and jaded enough to help him run a heist he'd been planning with another guy while he was in jail, so they skip town together and start getting to work. Their dynamic was extremely hot and cold, ranging from extended evenings of lovemaking to scenes where I genuinely thought one of them would betray or even kill the other. Definitely a lot of strong emotions flaring between these two people that would be awful for each other in real life but make for interesting fictional characters.
The ending was sufficiently tragic for my tastes, but I can't help but feel like I'll forget the bulk of this story in short order. While I didn't dislike them, I didn't really connect with these characters in a meaningful way and they also didn't strike me as all that different at the end from who they were at the beginning. But maybe the fact that they didn't go through any development and remained awful people was an intentional flaw on its own. I don't know, but it was a pretty middle of the road entry for the genre for me.
