Invisible Ink no 316: Lewis Elliott Chaze

During the postwar years, an American publishing house called Gold Medal Books introduced authors of hardboiled noir such as Jim Thompson, Chester Himes and David Goodis to a mass readership. At the time such lurid tales were dismissed as pulp, but eventually they were rehabilitated into their own literary canon.

However, one of their finest writers, Lewis Elliott Chaze, remained lost from view. Chaze had been born in Louisiana in 1915. His first book was published when he was 32. The Stainless Steel Kimono was an account of his experience while stationed in Japan.

It didn’t receive much attention, and he settled as a newspaperman in Mississippi, where he became an award-winning columnist for the Hattiesburg American. He married and had five children.

Like many other writers of his era, Chaze was a great admirer of Hemingway’s style. His prose was snub-nosed and nail-hard. It didn’t waste time with fancy descriptions, but felt authentic and was full of local colour.

In 1953, he wrote Black Wings Has My Angel, the UK edition of which had the kind of cover you want to pick up; a tough blonde in a red skirt and slip, pointing a gun, dragging a guy along with her as a hostage.

The caption reads; “She had the face of a Madonna and a heart made of dollar bills”.

It’s the story of Tim Sunblade, who escapes from prison with nothing but a plan in his pocket. He knows how to stage the perfect heist. There’s just one snag; it’ll take two to pull it off.

Unfortunately, his taste in women steers him to the one girl he should really stay away from. Virginia is a hooker, a “ten-dollar tramp” whose lavender eyes light up when money is mentioned.

After the crime is committed (resulting in a killing), the cash changes Virginia into “a candy- tonguing country club Cleopatra who nested in bed the whole day long and thought her feet were too damned good to walk on”.

Their love-hate relationship causes them to find the flaws in one another that will doom them. Chaze’s peers knew that the novel was more than just a pulp, it was the pulp, the best example of a noir outside of James M Cain.

The film remained in development forever, but with a screenplay by noir aficionado Barry Gifford it may finally go into production. Chaze wrote nine gutsy novels and died in 1990.