A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by George Kelley


WILLIAM HJORTSBERG – Falling Angel. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, hardcover, 1978. Fawcett, paperback, 1982; Warner Books, paperback, 1986; St. Martin’s, paperback, 1996. Millipede Press, trade paperback, 2006. Film: Tri-Star, 1987, as Angel Heart (with Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel).

   William Hjortsberg is a highly unconventional writer who delights in mixing genres and breaking molds. His first novel, Alp (1969), blends pornography and mountain climbng; his science-fiction novel, Gray Matters (1971) features a Utopia run by incredible cybernetic machines dedicated to human transcendence while humans rebel against the perfect society. Other experimental works include Symbiography (1973) and Toro! Toro! Toro! (1975).

   In Falling Angel, Hjortsberg combines 1940s private-eye fiction with the occult. PI Harry Angel, a specialist in finding missing persons, is hired to track down a famous Forties singer, Johnny Favorite. The trail leads to Central Park, voodoo ceremonies, a black mass in an abandoned subway station, Coney Island fortune-tellers, and bizarre murders. Harry Angel finds he’s involved in a satanic plot, and he might not be able to escape alive.

   Fallen Angel is William Hjortsberg’s most successful book; descriptions of New York City in the post-World War II era are clever and accurate. A condensed version of Falling Angel was published in Playboy and proved very popular. In trying to describe Falling Angel, Stephen King said, “I’ve never read anything remotely like it. Trying to imagine what might have happened if Raymond Chandler had written The Exorcist is as close as I can come.”

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.


WILLIAM HJORTSBERG, R. I. P.   Quoting from The Rap Sheet earlier this week:

    “The New York City-born Montana novelist who gave us private investigator Harry Angel (in 1978’s Falling Angel), the lively detective pairing of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini (in 1994’s Nevermore), and a drug-fueled nightmare excursion through 1960s Mexico (in 2015’s Mañana) passed away this last Saturday night of pancreatic cancer. Author William Hjortsberg, who was known to friends simply as ‘Gatz,’ was 76 years old.”