Il mio angelo ha le ali nere

Goodreads friend William Donelson boldly asserts this isn’t a novel to be read; this is a novel to be felt and a novel to be lived. After my own experience with Elliott Chaze's noir black angel, feeling its dramatic intensity and living through every single page with narrator Tim Sunblade and his be Leggi tutto

Those who abide in the noir world are meaner and greedier and their thoughts are always blacker and even the angels there fly on the black wings. This is the angel… The brown speckles in the lavender-gray eyes, floating very close to the surface when I kissed her, the eyes wide open and aware. But not Leggi tutto

”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…. I saw the light inside the armored car, glowing in Leggi tutto

Black Wings Has My Angel was originally published in 1953 as a Gold Medal mass-market paperback, one of the hundreds of pulpish novels aimed at male readers that filled paperback book racks in drugstores and other such places all over the country in the Fifties. For whatever reason, though, and unli Leggi tutto

Black Wings has my Angel by Elliot Chaze is a NYRB Classics publication. I ran across a post on PEN America about this book a few weeks back. It was originally published back in 1953 and is considered to be a ‘lost classic’, a book that is not necessarily well known to mainstream noir audiences, but Leggi tutto

As I am fond of saying, plot isn't always everything in a good crime novel, and Elliot Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel is a great case in point. It's also now the best crime novel I've read so far this year, and anyone who knows me knows that I do not say those words lightly. Written in 1953, it is Leggi tutto