Mon 27 Oct 2025
A PI Mystery Review by Tony Baer: WILLIAM HJORTSBERG – Falling Angel.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
WILLIAM HJORTSBERG – Falling Angel. PI Harry Angel #1. Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, hardcover, 1978. Fawcett, paperback, 1982. Warner Books, paperback, 1986. St. Martin’s, paperback, 1996. Film: Released as Angel Heart (Tri-Star, 1987) with Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, Lisa Bonet).
It’s the late 1950’s, NYC. A wealthy, corrupt seeming, seamy yet seemly man, Louis Cipher, hires a private dick, Harry Angel, to find a missing person. That missing person is Johnny Favorite, a dime store Sinatra who got big suddenly in the thirties, between the wars.
Harry Angel is your typical middle aged, hardboiled, drinking smoking detective, who prefers headbutts to subtle inquiry.
He attacks headlong on the trail, a hefty retainer under his belt.
Turns out Favorite was catatonic after the war, put in a home, then disappeared. His face was blown to smithereens, with reconstruction to make him presentable, if unrecognizable.
But every time Angel gets a lead, the lead ends up with a load of lead. The trail gets bloodier and bloodier until Angel finally cracks the case.
Imagine his surprise.
Loads of weird satanic rituals abound, as Johnny Favorite seems to have descended into that voodoo that he do so well.
I liked it. But having seen the ill-aging (and aren’t they all) Alan Parker film in the 80’s, I knew the twist, which kind of messed the impact up for me. It’s the kind of book that if you could avoid the film, first time you read it, would probably blow your socks off. But only the first time. And then afterwards you can appreciate it for what it was and will never be again for you, like a one nite stand you were happy you got away with. You’re slightly embarrassed for getting taken, you smirk at the wit, you envy the idea and the millions of bucks it earned Hjortsberg. Then you salute him and move on to something else.
—
NOTE: A second book in the series, entitled Angel’s Inferno, was published in 2020.
October 28th, 2025 at 5:48 am
You’ve reminded me of a lunch I had with a friend and his father back when I was in school. Sean, the dad, had just finished the novel, and was so enthusiastic that he shared the entire plot. This was only after we’d both told him that our reading lists were so large that we wouldn’t have time for it. Flash forward to my final year and a trip to the cinema to see Angel Heart (after all, DeNiro is in it). Guess I wan’t paying attention during the opening credits because it was only at the halfway point that I clued in to it being the adaptation. Falling Angel is a better title.
October 28th, 2025 at 6:00 am
If memory serves, Lisa Bonet, who played Denise Huxtable on THE COSBY SHOW, was concerned as to how her fans might react to her topless scene in the film. Cosby told her not to worry. Looking back. I can only say, of course he did.
October 28th, 2025 at 11:19 am
The movie gathered quite a bit of notoriety when it first came out, but I’m willing to wager that only a small, relatively few number of people remember it now.
October 28th, 2025 at 11:31 am
Yes, Steve, the film was completely forgettable except for that one scene with Bonet, which (he said with a mischievious twinkle) did have a couple of good points.
All in all, the book was much better.
October 28th, 2025 at 8:46 pm
I liked FALLING ANGEL, which was serialised in Playboy with (as I recall) pulpy Black Mask-era-style illustrations. Also liked Hjortsberg’s later novel NEVERMORE, with Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, and the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe pursuing a series of murders in the 1920s modelled on incidents from Poe’s storie. Thanks for mentioning ANGEL’S INFERNO, which I never heard of. I’ll have to track it down, even though FALLING ANGEL was perfect in its nihilistic ending that really didn’t call for a sequel.
October 28th, 2025 at 10:42 pm
I don’t know if I’m allowed to do this or not, but … here goes. I had no idea the follow-up book existed until yesterday. I went looking and found this unsigned review on its Amazon page. It’s more than I can handle, but maybe it will help any of you who are well versed in the first book in the series:
Does what it sets out to do-
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2022
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
And that is, tell the reader ‘what happened next’.
The other unanswered questions about the true identity of Louis Cyphre , who Harry Angel truly is, what happened to Johnny Favorite : All answered, and with answers that should be reasonably satisfying to the reader.
The main character of the first book is harder to empathize with than in the first. That’s to be expected : By the end of the first book, he learns that he is not who he thought he was ; throughout the second book he comes to accept the truth and (as a direct result) he commits worse and worse, objectively evil acts, until by the climax of the second book, it’s hard to feel much pity for his ultimate fate. His crimes are THAT increasingly awful.
Is the book as good as the first-? Not really…But I don’t think that’s due to any fault in Hjortsberg’s writing. Falling Angel (1978) was written and published in a moment of time in which people were rejecting the religion of their childhood, but they also rejected atheism/agnosticism. Many cobbled together a [Joseph] Campbell’s soup of a religion ; a little from astrology, a little from pseudo Buddhism or debased Vedanta, a little I Ching, a dash of wicca…While others went all-out into the Jesus Freaks or the Moral Majority. The “Satanic Panic” was already started when Falling Angel was published, and that gave the reader back then an extra frisson when reading it, as it fit so well with the time’s zeitgeist. Society has since moved on, into different fears and preoccupations. That probably hurts both books, makes them seem more like period pieces.
(Oh, and if anyone is disappointed that Janos Szabor and his books are fiction : Check out Michael Baigent and his works. I read Holy Blood, HolyGrail back in 1984, and “Szabor’s” text seemed to be based at least loosely on Baigent’s theories, per my memory.)
November 1st, 2025 at 3:08 am
I enjoyed FALLING ANGEL but having seen several movies with a variation on the basic plot, minus the demonic aspect, I figured the ending out long before the writer got around to it. Hjortsberg was a good writer and could have written a perfectly good novel without such an obvious gimmick that, save for the supernatural, had been beaten to death in film noir, Westerns, pulps, and episodic television.
I’ll play nice and post no spoilers, but honestly it is such a hoary old plot twist it really doesn’t deserve all the tiptoeing around the big reveal.
The movie was tiresome and predictable, and I had no desire to read the sequel though I agree with Fred about NEVERMORE.