Tears Are For Angels

by Paul Connolly (Pseudonym), Tom Wicker

It took murder to teach him that the twin sister of hate - was love.

Genres: Noir, Mystery

177 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

A pseudonym used by Tom Wicker.

Wicker wrote three Gold Medal paperback originals early in his career using this pseudonym.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Noir masterpiece for sure. How did did this not get mentioned in the books on crime and pulp fiction by Horsley, Haut, O'Brien, and Ritt? How did this not get made into a movie in the 1950s?! Soon as I finished this I went back and read it again, hardly believing that it could be as good as it seemed the first time and found myself riveted once again. The beginning is a stone cold killer. Harry London, down as far as a man can go, out in his hermit cabin bingeing on white lightning and shooting at cans while trying to visualize the face of the man he wants to kill. And up drives Jean Cummings to throw down the challenge. After a sharp opening battle between them, the rest of the story comes churning out. How Harry got down so low, his wife's murder, the vengeance he seeks, and the devil's bargain he and Jean strike-up to bring about that vengeance, which she also seeks, to fruition. The build-up is twisty and tense and the unraveling ending sequence does not disappoint. This is a great one that needs to be rediscovered and appreciated by fans of crime/noir fiction.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tears are for Angels (1952) is a masterpiece of noir and despair. It is the story of a man at the end of his rope with nothing left to live for except the bare possibility of slight revenge. Harry London has been living in a dilapidated shack in the country for three years, drinking jars of homemade swill and bits of bread. There is barely anything left to him at all. His one great love had been Lucy and she betrayed him with the local storeowner Casanova. In fact, London caught them in bed together and before he could blow this guy’s brains out, something happened. There was a struggle with the gun and Lucy ended up dead and the other man, Dick Stewart, gone. London could only claim suicide and let it go at that. He couldn’t stand the shame of having been cuckolded in his own bed.

Jean Cummings, a woman he has never seen before who claims she once knew Lucy in New York has arrived at his dirty shack and London, drunk, and dirty, rage at her and basically attacks her. She wants to know what really happened to Lucy and the suicide story won’t fly with her.

The story (and it comes out only in bits and pieces) is London and Cummings trying to come to terms with what happened to Lucy and exacting their revenge on Stewart who seems untouchable. Of course, all plans and those of desperate people, especially, go a bit awry.

Connolly offers us readers a top-notch story that is never more than a step from absolute despair and he holds your attention as London tries to piece his life back together.

[Edwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Connolly is a pseudonym for Tom Wicker, a notable writer of political non-fiction and NY Times journalist for over 30 years. Wicker started out writing paperback originals for Gold Medal, all sadly out of print. This novel "Tears are for Angels" is much more than a typical pulp crime book. It tells the story of a man who has fallen into the deepest pits of despair and his struggle back, motivated first by vengeance, and then by love. The novel is fast paced with clever and surprising twists, and plenty of sex and violence.

I'm glad that Wicker achieved the dream of many Gold Medal novelists, becoming a "serious" writer, and very thankful for this legacy Noir masterpiece. Highly recommended.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overlooked noir gem from newspaperman Tom Wicker writing as Paul Connolly.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5 actually; though it felt a little long in parts.)

This is an early pulp novel of the great NYT journalist and editor Tom Wicker (writing as Paul Connolly). Wicker did not join the Times until Spring 1960, and he was the only NYT reporter to be in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. He sure could write.

“She got up and walked steadily past me, out the door and on across the sand, and then she disappeared beyond the big dune. I went to the door and stood looking after her, and I never loved her so much as then. Because the lonely slump of her shoulders and the defeated way she walked told me what it was that made me love her. Not the nights, not the bodies entwined in passion, but the deep hurt and loneliness in her, the complete absence of hope, not bitterness, not anger, just final and irrevocable hopelessness.”

A very good example of Otto Penzler’s fundamental distinction between ‘noir’ (the irredeemable existential despair of all the grifters and losers and the plain unlucky) as opposed to the hardboiled detectives (Chandler’s “Knight errant”) of the pulp crime novels. This is clearly an example of the former, and not the latter (though these two sub-genres of mystery writing do, to be sure, often overlap).

[Alonzo Church · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our hero and narrator is one of those guys beloved by 50s fiction, the hopeless drunk with a past. Our guy started drinking and stopped bathing and shaving about two years past. You see, something horrible happened. Hero caught his lovely, perfect wife in bed with the town playboy. He doesn’t remember so well what happened after that. The wife ended up dead and hero lost his arm because of gunshots. Fortunately, he still had one arm and he could drink the local moonshine.

Then a woman came to his shack. A woman with a lame story, an attitude, and a hate for our hero he couldn’t understand. Hero tried smacking her around a bit but she found ways to stick around. So he told her his story — the parts he could remember — and then they had some hate sex and more hate sex until it turned to love sex. Then they started plotting their mutual revenge on the town playboy…

I couldn’t warm up to this one. There’s nothing wrong with a revenge plot, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to waste their time helping the hero. Some good twists towards the end do salvage this one, so you might as well finish it if you start it.

[Regan MacArthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Believe the other reviewers. This is a marvelous novel. Like Elmore Leonard, Connolly took the work of Hemingway like a vitamin supplement and developed a strong style all his own. (Note: this trick only works if the vitamin-taker had talent to begin with.) I wish Connolly had written more like these. Tears Are For Angels is worthy of standing alongside the works of the best of the best of Gold Medal authors like John D. MacDonald, McPartland, Donald Hamilton, etc.