William Hjortsberg, the novelist who gave noir a theology and spent twenty years on the man it missed

William Hjortsberg

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	February 23, 1941 New York, United States
Died	April 22, 2017 (76)
Occupation	Novelist and screenwriter
Awards	Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Stanford University · National Endowment · 2 Playboy Editorial · Edgar Award , Mystery Writers of America (nomination)

The one thing William Hjortsberg’s most famous character and his creator shared was an unwillingness to accept the job at face value. Harry Angel, the private eye at the center of Falling Angel, takes a routine missing-person case and arrives somewhere his profession has no map for. Hjortsberg, who invented him, took a genre he understood well — hard-boiled noir — and rebuilt it around the occult, the antebellum South, and a theology of consequence so precise that when Alan Parker adapted it in 1987, the resulting film became a cult object partly because the novel’s architecture could bear the weight.

He was born William Reinhold Hjortsberg on February 23, 1941, in New York City, the only child of a Swedish restaurateur father and a Swiss mother, and went through life under the nickname “Gatz” — a reduction of a surname that schoolyards apparently could not manage. He studied English at Dartmouth, drama at Yale, and arrived at Stanford in 1967 as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, where he met Thomas McGuane. That friendship would eventually pull him west until he stopped in Montana.

Before Falling Angel, Hjortsberg had been publishing fiction that resisted easy categorization. Alp (1969) placed a circus performer in an absurdist alpine landscape; Gray Matters (1971) proposed a dystopian future organized around disembodied brains; Symbiography (1973) and Toro! Toro! Toro! (1974) extended a body of work whose appetite for the strange was apparent from the first page. None found the audience that would come later. What they announced was a writer unwilling to settle.

Falling Angel appeared in 1978, serialized first in Playboy, and won the magazine’s Editorial Award for Best Major Work — beating that year’s entries by Graham Greene and Gabriel García Márquez. The mystery fiction establishment nominated it for the Edgar Award. The book earned him a readership but not quite the literary standing its ambitions warranted, received as a genre novel of unusual quality rather than as literature.

The reception changed through the film. Angel Heart, directed by Alan Parker and starring Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel and Robert De Niro as the unforgettable Louis Cyphre, opened in 1987 to controversy that included a near-X-rating from the MPAA and to the kind of attention the novel had not received on its own. Lisa Bonet, cast against type, contributed to a scene that made the rating board uneasy. Parker wrote the screenplay; the novel’s construction — the embedded theology, the unreliable narrator, the noir-meets-supernatural engine — is entirely Hjortsberg’s. He has been credited since as the source rather than the author of what the film contains.

He also wrote the screenplay for Ridley Scott‘s Legend (1985), a medieval fantasy starring Tom Cruise — a project distant from his fiction but demonstrating how widely he could range for hire. Screenwriting was not where his ambitions lived. The novels were, and the persistent gap between what the industry made of his imagination and what he made of it himself would define his reputation for the rest of his career.

He moved permanently to Montana in 1971, settling in Paradise Valley south of Livingston, where Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, and Peter Matthiessen had formed a loose literary colony. He remained there for the rest of his life — a decision that put him at a productive distance from the cultural centers that might otherwise have managed his literary identity for him.

The most sustained project of his career was Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, a biography of the poet and novelist who had lived near him in Montana and died in 1984. Hjortsberg spent approximately twenty years on it, conducted 169 interviews, and produced a work of roughly 880 pages published by Counterpoint Press in 2012. Within Brautigan scholarship it is considered definitive. Outside that limited field, it received the serious attention that literary biography deserves and considerably less visibility than the work that made Hjortsberg’s name. He invested more time in it than in anything else he produced.

Nevermore (1994) demonstrated that Falling Angel had not exhausted his interest in historical atmosphere and generic disruption. Set in Paris, it placed Edgar Allan Poe alongside Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini in a mystery built from layers of literary reference that made its pleasures ostentatious and deliberate. It is the work of a writer who had read everything and was not embarrassed to show it.

The critical gap in his career — celebrated for what the movies made of his work, most serious in what the movies never touched — does not appear to have burdened him. A 2016 opera adaptation of Falling Angel at the Brevard Music Center, with music by J. Mark Scearce and a libretto by Lucy Thurber, confirmed that the novel’s architecture continued to attract interpreters decades after its publication. Friends remembered Hjortsberg as a man of substantial warmth whose laugh one witness described as resembling a chainsaw, who was teaching his grandchildren to fish in Paradise Valley when pancreatic cancer was diagnosed in early 2017.

He died on April 22, 2017, in Livingston, Montana, at seventy-six. Angel’s Inferno, the sequel to Falling Angel he had been finishing when the diagnosis arrived, was published posthumously by Counterpoint Press in 2020 — the continuation of a story he had started nearly forty years earlier, completed on his own terms and no one else’s.

Tags: novelists, Angel Heart, Alan Parker, American authors, Falling Angel, Jubilee Hitchhiker