Black Wings Has My Angel: A Classic Noir Novel of Heist, Desire, and Doom - Hardcover

An escaped convict, a dangerous woman, and an armored-car robbery drive one of the bleakest and most admired noir novels of the 1950s. Tim Sunblade has broken out of prison and drifted into Louisiana oil-field work when he meets Virginia, a beautiful call girl with her own history of flight, appetite, and damage. What begins as a temporary arrangement turns into a violent partnership, and the two move west toward Denver with a plan for a robbery that could make them rich-or destroy them completely.

First published by Gold Medal Books in 1953, Black Wings Has My Angel is classic paperback noir at its hardest: desire, greed, sex, money, deception, and doom moving together in a straight line toward catastrophe. The plot turns on an armored-car heist in Colorado, but the real force of the novel is the poisoned bond between Tim and Virginia, two people clever enough to imagine escape and damaged enough to ruin it. For readers of classic noir fiction, hardboiled crime, heist novels, Gold Medal paperbacks, doomed-lovers crime fiction, and rediscovered mid-century American crime novels, Elliott Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel is a Black Curtain title with real cult authority. The University of Southern Mississippi notes that the novel began as a Gold Medal paperback original about an armored-car robbery in Colorado and has remained relevant through multiple reprints and renewed critical attention.