Why I like Henri Pirenne better than "Chris" Wickham, plus Black Wings Has My Angel

I've read all or parts of three books recently by the great historian Henri Pirenne, who wrote in the last century, and never once does he use the words narrative, storyline, or interventionist. That's one reason I like him better than I do his successor in our time Chris Wickham. Another is that Wickham writes under the name Chris, even though his name is Christopher. Call me old school, but I say save that informality for the pub. If you're going to write a book about ancient Rome and its heritage in the Middle Ages, use your full name.

2) Black Wings Has My Angel is as chilling a work of noir as it is said to be, and it has been reprinted by New York Review Books, so you know it packs a ton of literary respectability. But don't hold that against Elliott Chaze's 1953 novel, originally published by Gold Medal. The novel follows several conventions of mid-century noir (readers of Jim Thompson might like it, or of Charles Williams at his darkest, for example), and it does does so thoroughly and well. But Chaze's writing is so understated, its narrator/protagonist's reaction to his hellish so circumstances so heartbreakingly matter-of-fact at times and so tragically noble at others, that the book becomes at the same time something more.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Black Wings Has My Angel

Barry Gifford is right so far about Black Wings Has My Angel. The author of Wild at Heart called Elliott Chaze's 1953 lovers-on-the-run story "An astonishingly well-written literary novel that just happened to be about (or roundabout) a crime."

The novel is so well-written, and so diverting in its incident, that when Chaze injects not just a noir touch a few chapters in, but one of the must typical mid-twentieth-century noir touches, it seems entirely new and entirely right.  This is not what I think of when I think of Gold Medal Books, but that is precisely who first published the book.

Two more observations:  One is unlikely to read description much better than Chaze's of the waitress "who was hanging over the table like a fat starched cloud," and I'm hardly surprised Gifford loved this book, because in its story and in the relaxed, off-hand, humorous way of telling it, even at its grimmest, it seems a virtual blueprint for Wild at Heart and the rest of Gifford's Sailor and Lula novels.

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Gifford is not just an author and screenwriter.. His Black Lizard Press launched the revival of interest in paperback-original writers from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, including Elliott Chaze.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015