Black Wings Has My Angel

They sure boiled their books hard back in the '50s. This one, published in 1953, has been almost as difficult to find since as an armored car at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft (to borrow a memorable detail from the story) but now that it's been brought back into print it still packs a solid punch. Chaze was a newspaperman whose novels never got much recognition, but Black Wings, by all accounts his masterpiece, is a tersely beautiful tale that's just as pleasing for its surprising digressions into the loveliness of mountain air and the proper construction of a reinforced trailer as it is for its central drama of two doomed lovers caught in a spiral of sex, boredom, and crime.