The story moves swiftly from the backwoods of Mississippi to New Orleans, to Sunblade’s small hometown, to Denver, and ultimately deep into the Colorado Rockies. Its centerpiece is a daring armored-car robbery meticulously planned by Sunblade and executed by him with Virginia’s help, but the primary focus throughout is the corrosive relationship between the pair. Their compulsions lead inevitably to a shattering noir ending, one in which, as Collins says, “they ride out an even deeper, dark compulsion: to look into a certain abandoned mine shaft, to stare into the darkness that is death.”
As good as Black Wings is, it had little commercial and critical success in 1953. In the early 1950s several Gold Medal novels sold upward of half a million copies each, and a few, such as Gil Brewer’s 13 French Street, exceeded the million mark, but Chaze’s novel had modest sales and passed unnoticed by newspaper and magazine reviewers. A second paperback edition was published by Berkley in 1962, under the title One for My Money, and in 1985 a British hardcover edition appeared from Robert Hale under the slightly different title of One for the Money, but both of these editions had small printings and sold more poorly than the Gold Medal original. It would be nearly half a century before Black Wings finally began to achieve some of the widespread attention it deserves through a series of U.S. and U.K. reissues.
• • •
A brief overview of Elliott Chaze’s life and career:
Chaze (1915–90) was by profession a newspaperman of the old school. He began his journalism career with the New Orleans Bureau of the Associated Press shortly before Pearl Harbor, worked for a time in AP’s Denver office after paratrooper service in World War II, then migrated south to Mississippi, where he spent twenty years as a reporter and award-winning columnist for the Hattiesburg American, and another ten years as the paper’s city editor.
In his spare time he wrote articles and short stories for The New Yorker, Life, Redbook, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and other prominent magazines, and, all too infrequently, novels. In an interview he once stated that his motivation in writing fiction, “if there is any discernible, is probably ego and fear of mathematics, with overtones of money. Primarily I have a simple desire to shine my ass—to show off a bit in print.”
His literary mainstream novels include The Stainless Steel Kimono (1947), a postwar tale about a group of American paratroopers in Japan that was a modest best seller and avowed favorite of Ernest Hemingway; The Gold Tag (1950), which, like much of his fiction, has a newspaper background and contains a good deal of autobiography; and the best of all his noncriminous works, Tiger in the Honeysuckle (1965), an adroit, explosive tale of the turbulent civil rights movement in the South, which he witnessed firsthand. He also published a wryly amusing collection of essays about his family life in Hattiesburg, Two Roofs and a Snake on the Door (1963).
Chaze’s second criminous work, Wettermark (1969), is similar to Black Wings in that it, too, in Barry Gifford’s phrase, is a literary novel that just happens to be about (or roundabout) a crime. In its own quiet, sardonic way Wettermark is very nearly as good. Its setting is the small town of Catherine, Mississippi (a thinly disguised Hattiesburg), where the protagonist, the eponymous Wettermark, toils as a reporter for the local paper. Wettermark is a tragicomic figure, accent on the tragic—a weary, financially strapped, ex-alcoholic wage slave whose early novelist ambitions have been long since shattered by rejection and apathy. His arrival on the scene of a successful bank robbery plants a seed in his mind, “a glimpse of the green” that is nurtured by circumstance and his personal demons until it blossoms into a cunning heist scheme of his own. The novel is by turns funny, sad, bitter, mordant, and ultimately as dark and unforgiving as Black Wings.
Late in his life, after his retirement from newspapering, Chaze wrote three offbeat, ribald (occasionally downright bawdy), and often darkly funny mysteries, all featuring Kiel St. James, a well-meaning but somewhat bumbling city editor for the Catherine Call (Catherine having been mysteriously moved from Mississippi to Alabama for this series); Crystal Bunt, Kiel’s highly sexed young photographer girlfriend; and Chief of Detectives Orson Boles, a tenacious cop given to wearing hideous lizard-green polyester suits and speaking alternately in Southern grits-and-gravy dialect and perfect English.
Each of the three St. James adventures, Goodbye, Goliath (1983), Mr. Yesterday (1984), and Little David (1985), drew enthusiastic critical praise, but like Wettermark and, until recently, Black Wings, they seem to have slid into obscurity soon after publication and undeservedly remain there. The best of the trio is Mr. Yesterday, which deals with the murders of two eccentric old spinsters, one by a fall and one by an exceedingly bizarre stabbing. The motive for the two killings and the method employed in the latter are quite literally the weirdest, wildest, most inventive, most audacious (and yet completely plausible) ever devised for a mystery novel.
As Black Wings Has My Angel and his other novels attest, Chaze was a fine prose stylist and a consummate storyteller; he was also, especially in his later novels, witty, insightful, nostalgic, and irreverent. Black Wings and Wettermark are his only true noir novels, but there are strong noir elements in all of his book-length fiction. Like Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis, he understood and unerringly depicted the depths and dark reaches of the human soul and what can and does happen when that darkness is given dominion.
In a career spanning nearly half a century, Bill Pronzini has published seventy-five novels, four nonfiction books, and 350 short stories, articles, and essays. His awards include a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, the organization’s highest honor, presented in 2008; three Shamuses, two for best novel, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America; and France’s Grand Prix de la Litterature Policiere for Snowbound (1988). Two other suspense novels, A Wasteland of Strangers and The Crimes of Jordan Wise, were nominated for the Hammett Prize in 1997 and 2006, respectively, by the International Crime Writers’ Association. His most recent novel is Hellbox (Forge 2012), the thirty-sixth in his well-regarded “Nameless Detective” series.
The Big Heat
by William P. McGivern (1953)
EDDIE MULLER
* * *
William P. McGivern (1922–82) published more than twenty novels in his lifetime, including a number under the pseudonym Bill Peters. He worked as a police reporter in Philadelphia before moving to Los Angeles in 1960 to write for television and film, and a number of his books were successfully adapted to film, most notably The Big Heat. His wife, Maureen Daly, is often credited with writing the first young-adult novel, Seventeenth Summer, the story of a seventeen-year-old girl’s first romance, which was published in 1942.
* * *
It’s one of the most vicious moments in movie history. Sadistic hoodlum Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), fed up with incessant needling from his moll, Debby Marsh, splashes a potful of boiling coffee in her face, scarring her for the rest of her short life.
Everyone who loves old crime movies knows the scene. It’s unforgettable, especially as it results in the beguiling Gloria Grahame playing the rest of the film with her head half hidden in bandages. In the fifty-eight years since it was made, no review of The Big Heat (1953) has failed to cite that scene—or give full credit for its shocking impact to “auteur” director Fritz Lang.
“You bitch,” Stone shouted again. He glared around wildly, and saw the steaming coffee pot on the table. Without thinking, without willing the action, his hand moved; he scooped it up and hurled the scalding coffee into her face.
Debby screamed and staggered backwards, clawing at her face with both hands. She collided with a chair and fell to the floor, her body jackknifing spasmodically, and her gold-sandaled feet churning and kicking wildly. She stopped screaming almost immediately; the only sound that came from her was a ghastly choking noise, like that of a child who has sobbed itself to a point beyond exhaustion.
Fritz Lang didn’t write those words. They’re the work of William P. McGivern
, a former Philadelphia crime reporter who’d written reams of short fiction in the 1940s before breaking out in 1953 with The Big Heat. The success of the film led to subsequent McGivern novels being snapped up by Hollywood and turned into good, sometimes great, crime movies: Shield for Murder (1954), Rogue Cop (1954), Hell on Frisco Bay (1955), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). In adapting The Big Heat as a screenplay, another one-time crime reporter, Sydney Boehm, barely altered the novel. No need: the book is perfectly structured, its characters vividly and efficiently defined. With all due respect to Fritz Lang, a story this strong (and this smartly cast) could have been helmed by any number of Hollywood directors and turned out just as well.
McGivern himself was more generous, declaring in later years, “I don’t think that my book is a classic, but I think Fritz Lang’s filmed version is. My story is more a modern fable, a fantasy we all enjoy reflecting on, a man hurt by the system in the most cruel way . . . He fights back and he wins, not only a physical victory, but a sort of intellectual and emotional catharsis.”
The Big Heat is the tale of an idealistic, straight-arrow police detective, Dave Bannion, who suspects that a fellow cop’s suicide might be murder. When his investigation is hindered by his superiors, Bannion sniffs something rotten in the department. Lucy Carroway, once the dead cop’s lover, contacts Bannion and cryptically hints at where the metaphorical bodies are buried. Before Bannion can reach her, Lucy is one of the actual bodies. Defying orders to ease off the hunt, the overworked and underpaid flatfoot traces Lucy’s murder to local mob boss Mike Lagana; Bannion vows to bring “the big heat” down on the high-living gangster. In retaliation, Lagana goes old-school, planting a bomb in Bannion’s car only to have it kill the cop’s beloved wife, Kate.
Here The Big Heat rushes headlong into harsh territory for the early 1950s: Bannion becomes a vigilante, determined to avenge his wife’s death. He turns in his badge but won’t relinquish his .38 service revolver. “This gun belongs to me,” he snarls. As I pointed out in my 1998 book, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, the film version of this cops-and-robbers saga quickly becomes an urban Western:
Locked and loaded, The Big Heat gallops into the concrete frontier: there are showdowns in saloons, rustlers biding time with endless hands of poker, a robber baron devouring territory while tin stars look the other way. And most critically, there’s the whore with the heart of gold.
While searching for these cross-genre parallels—and lazily giving all credit for the film’s greatness to Sydney Boehm and Fritz Lang—I committed a grievous error: I neglected to read the source novel. If I had, I would have realized that William P. McGivern was entirely responsible for the story’s freshness and power. Anyone who calls it “Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat” is succumbing, stupidly, to the cult of the auteur (mea culpa, mea culpa).
The power of The Big Heat comes from McGivern finally writing about a world with which he was well acquainted: big-city crime. During the early 1940s he’d earned his bones as an author churning out cut-rate science fiction for Amazing Stories, toiling without distinction under editor Raymond Palmer. From 1943–46 McGivern served in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of sergeant and earning a medal for rescuing comrades trapped by toxic gas inside a bombed tank. After mustering out, he tried to cram in some higher learning by briefly enrolling in the University of Birmingham in England. College was superfluous: it was the next two years that offered the real education—working the police beat for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. In fact, The Big Heat is dedicated to that paper’s city editor, Earl Selby. The novel is based on a case McGivern covered during his first year cityside, tracking the civic corruption revealed in a city official’s suicide note. He eventually wrote The Big Heat in a three-week burst in 1952, while living in Rome.
McGivern’s dispassionate reporter’s prose is The Big Heat’s greatest asset. His characters sometimes rant and rave and spill their guts in righteous monologues, but McGivern’s narration remains steady and swift, with a keen eye for telling details and few wasted words. If you’ve seen the film, you no doubt recall the stunning scene in which Bannion’s wife (played by Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister) is killed by the car bomb meant for her husband. Here’s how McGivern renders it in the novel:
Bannion’s car was before the house, under the shade of a tree. Smoke was pouring from it and the front end looked as if it had been flattened by a blow from a mighty fist. He leaped down the steps, his heart contracting with horror, and ran to the side of the car. The front door wouldn’t open; it was jammed tight, buckled and wrinkled. Bannion smashed the glass with his fist, shouting to Kate in a wild voice. He got a hold on the door and jerked it open, pulled it completely away from the body of the car with a mighty, despairing wrench, not caring about, not even feeling the glass cutting into his hands.
That paragraph is rendered precisely in the movie. In fact, whole sections of the screenplay are lifted almost verbatim from the novel. Scenarist Sydney Boehm, good as he was, was basically stealing money when he cashed that Columbia Pictures check. Perhaps appropriately, it was McGivern who was given the 1954 Best Motion Picture Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for The Big Heat, the last time the MWA honored the author of a source novel rather than the screenwriter. Apparently, there was no bad blood between the novelist and Boehm, who in short order was hired to adapt two more McGivern books: Rogue Cop for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and The Darkest Hour, which Alan Ladd’s Jaguar Productions turned into Hell on Frisco Bay.
What made McGivern’s novels film-ready was his facility at creating memorable characters minus the need for backstories. In the best Hammett tradition, McGivern’s characters emerge entirely within the immediacy of the unfolding action, but never feel one-dimensional. Like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Heat is completely character-driven, full of pace but surprisingly light on action. Glenn Ford’s performance as the vengeful cop is completely true to the novel, although the Bannion in the book is more complex, and McGivern’s attitude toward him more ambiguous. While Bannion is depicted onscreen as a loving husband-father hounded by villains, on the page McGivern presents him from the outset as a righteous crusader, a man who turns to the parish priest and dog-eared philosophy books for advice and consolation. (St. John of the Cross, Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, and George Santayana are all invoked.) Bannion deeply believes there is an underlying order to the world, and that man’s inherent nature is good. After his wife’s murder, his hell-bent quest for vengeance is depicted as a torturous moral struggle. He learns that there is an underlying order to the world, and it has nothing to do with inherent goodness.
There’s a powerful scene late in the story, played in a more minor key in the film, where Bannion confronts the suicidal cop’s calculating widow. He’s learned that she’s extorting payoffs from both the cops and the crooks, using the suicide note her husband left behind, which reveals Lagana’s bribery of police officials. Only in the event of her death will the note be made public. Bannion decides to kill her.
This was the end of it, Bannion thought, seeing her as only the last obstacle between himself and vengeance. When the shot sounded, when this mute, foolishly gesticulating creature was dead, he could put away his gun and call the police. The job would be done . . . He had only to pull the trigger, let the firing pin snap forward, and the steel-jacketed bullet would take care of the rest, take care of this soft, perfumed, sadistic bitch, and with her Stone, Lagana, the hoodlums who had murdered his wife and held this town in their big, bitter grip.
Of course, Bannion retains his humanity and lets Mrs. Deery live. In the novel, as in the film, it’s Debby who ends up killing Mrs. Deery, as a way of settling the score with her abusive boyfriend and helping out the “nice guy” cop. But a significant difference between book and film reveals McGivern’s priorities, which are at odds with the typically cathartic Hollywood scenario.
In the movie, Debby calls unexpectedly on the dismissive Mrs. Deery, and Boehm’s script gives her a te
rrific line—“We’re sisters under the mink”—before she pulls a .38 from her fur-coat pocket and blasts away. It’s a great scene, perfectly played by Gloria Grahame and Jeanette Nolan. The shiver of excitement it provides is immensely satisfying.
But McGivern takes a different tack in his novel. He plays it off-screen, in a phone call:
He knew the voice. “Yes. Where are you?”
“I decided to get out of your hair,” she said. “You were a good egg about it, but I was a nuisance.” She laughed then, an odd little laugh. “You weren’t so tough after all. But that’s okay. You’re better off being a little soft.”
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Sure, I’m fine.”
“Where are you?”
“Did I forget that? I’m at Mrs. Deery’s, Bannion.”
Bannion sat up abruptly. “Are you crazy? What in hell are you doing there?”
“I’m proving something, I guess.” She laughed again, softly. “I’m proving I’m a tough guy.’
“Get the hell out of there, Debby.”
“No, I’m staying.”
Bannion hesitated, feeling a sudden coldness in his stomach. “Where’s Mrs. Deery, Debby?”
“She’s dead, Bannion.”
McGivern withholds the vicarious thrill of retribution. All we get is Bannion’s sickening realization that his crusade has turned this otherwise innocent woman into a murderer, a tool of his bitter vengeance.
In the film, Debby pays Vince Stone back with a hot java facial of his own before she dies in the crossfire of a climactic gunfight between Bannion and her ex-boyfriend. In the novel, however, her tough-girl act crumbles; knowing her days are numbered, she shoots herself. Although Bannion achieves his goal, killing Stone and exposing Lagana’s corruption of the police department, the victory feels Pyrrhic as he leaves the hospital after Debby has died.