Black Wings has My Angel by Lewis Elliott Chaze

Black Wings has My Angel by Lewis Elliott Chaze

published 1953

 

Black Wings has my Angel  is an extraordinary piece of noir – the astonishing thing to me is that it is not more famous, and that there has been only one, under-the-radar, film made. Couldn't be more different from the last book I blogged on, by Barbara Pym. You would think - but see the important note at the end of the post ***

And, y'know, human life comes in many forms.

When I posted on John Franklin Bardin earlier this year, my cousin (Hi Nick!) recommended this one as being in a similar vein. I was intrigued by the title – it is parsed, I think, as ‘My angel has black wings’ though to me it could equally be a character: [The person] BlackWings has [taken] my angel.

First person narrator Tim Sunblade (not, we discover, his real name) has just finished a session working on an oil rig in Louisiana, is staying in a cheap motel and orders up a prostitute via the bellhop. Virginia is a piece of work in every sense of the phrase:

Her eyes were lavender-gray and her hair was light creamy gold and springy-looking, hugging her head in curves rather than absolute curls. She wore a navy-blue beret of the kind you associate with European movies. Then there was the hair and face and a long loose stretch of metal-colored raincoat, very wet, and the cold smell of it plain in the mustiness. Then there were the legs and the bellhop wasn’t kidding about them. Then there were the feet, broad and fat and short as a baby’s. The shoes looked expensive, brown suede and shiningly wet.

 

(I was fascinated by her fat stumpy feet)

She has been hired for the night, but he has money and the two of them fall into a kind of relationship which neither of them tries to define. (Pretty Woman it isn’t). They travel around, try to leave each other, try to cheat each other, have wild sex the whole time.

We discover more of both their not very edifying backlives. Tim has been in jail, and has a plan for a heist, passed onto him by a fellow prisoner. This involved the most unlikely use of a motorhome/camper van that you could imagine. It also involves their living a suburban life together in a small town, while they work up to their big plan.

…when Virginia watered the lawn in a pair of faded denim shorts and the cocoa-colored T shirt made of toweling, they came out on their front porches in droves...

You know from early on that this probably isn’t going to go well. But the story has plenty of twists and turns, and dramatic settings – it really would make a great film.

There’s a girdle featuring prominently in the plot – Virginia has a perfect figure and doesn’t need one (though that’s not how it worked in those days, a girdle was yet one more shibboleth of respectability). But:

Then we went to a department store and I bought her a pink girdle that had wide panels in it and was several sizes too big for her. The panels were important…

… because they make a good hiding place. Later:

Trying to strip the thing off her was like trying to skin a baby python with a sledge hammer for a head.

They end up camping out, and fair play to her, Virginia can cope with most things:

If I took my time maybe Virginia would cook breakfast, although she looked less like a cooker of breakfast than anyone I ever knew.

…but she has.

Neither of them trusts the other, and they are quite right not to, though it obviously also makes the attraction stronger. Tim gets jealous seeing her with another man:

He was running his hand up and down her back as they talked. She wore a dress and cut down to the small of her back. So there was plenty of space for him to cover. When he tired of one spot he moved on to another, his hand busy as a tarantula in a fly cage. I can’t describe the way it made me feel.

Always ready with an appealing image…

Chase is very good at describing clothes, and very good at keeping you turning the pages. It is a compelling book, as sad and dark as it could be. I loved it.

*** In Jane and Prudence, there is an abortive trip to the cinema with a young man. They imagine the French film they might have seen:

"a girl in a mackintosh and a beret is standing in a doorway… a little later on there is the room with the iron bedstead and the girl in her petticoat..."

A most exact description of scenes in this book. and Chase mentions European films too. Both books published in 1953 - how nice to think that Chase and Pym were watching the same films at opposite ends of the world, literally and metaphorically.

Girdle picture  1953 advert

Screengrab of Dorothy Patrick  in  Follow me Quietly, 1949