Above you see a beautiful cover for Verne Chute’s 1951 novel Flight of an Angel, with high action art by Robert Stanley. The title of the book, like Lou Cameron’s 1960 masterpiece Angel’s Flight, is provided by the famous Los Angeles funicular line on Bunker Hill. The story is set in 1943 and is about a man with amnesia. He has it when the tale opens. Though at a loss, he cleverly takes his cues from others to find out his name is Jamey-Boy Raider. He subsequently discovers that his life is pretty good. He has a decent job, a good apartment, and a smoking hot wife who adores him. It also soon becomes clear that his amnesia is a recurrence of an earlier spell of memory loss. Somehow, he must have been struck on the head twice.
Raider is almost willing to leave well enough alone, what with his nice wife and comfy flat, but men pop up who seem to be from his forgotten past, and they aren’t nice. He learns that he may have been some kind of mob operative in San Francisco. He decides he has to know who he was—or is—so up to the Bay he goes, and discovers that it all has to do with the murder of a San Francisco industrialist’s son. Did he commit the crime? How did he get amnesia in the first place? Why was he found wandering in only a sheet? Is his wife really his wife? Who was the other woman who recognized him on Angel’s Flight only to say she’d made a mistake? That’s a lot of mystery for one guy to unravel.
We wanted to love Flight of an Angel. It had promise, but poor execution hurt it. The narrative gets bogged down with unimportant details, everything from cigarette smoking to shopping. Literary authors can make those moments resonate, but here they contribute to what feels like a lack of focus and poor pacing. Chute was an experienced writer who published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, but even experienced practitioners take missteps occasionally. By the three-quarters mark the novelty of the book has worn off, and the answer to the amnesia puzzle—when it finally comes—feels long overdue. But in its favor, you’ll probably never read another book where a dead cat is successfully used to terrify a gangster into talking.
