Data & Dames

Early on in Cloudthief, one character reads “a creased old heist novel about the holdup of an armored car in Denver.” That the novel in question is Elliott Chaze’s unimprovably titled Black Wings Has My Angel (1953) becomes increasingly clear from what follows.1In Chaze’s book, the narrator, Tim (not his real name), and the femme fatale Virginia (not hers either) drive across the United States to commit a carefully planned crime. Along the way she dreams of bathing in dollar bills, he hides his money from her, and they buy a fake wedding ring. Tim alternates between suspicion of Virginia and something that, to his embarrassment, might be love. But even at their closest, they never really trust each other, and at one point he finds her in a bar picking up a black-haired stranger. Nevertheless they pull off their daring heist (is there any other kind?) and head to New Orleans—their apparent success undermined only later by the revelation that Tim is narrating from a prison cell.All of this happens in Cloudthief too. Yet whereas Black Wings is unfailingly taut, Nathaniel Rich’s fourth novel—his first in eight years—is a far baggier affair, with the Chaze-derived heist just one of its ...