William Hjortsberg, the novelist who gave cinema its most unsettling detective and then worked twenty years for a dead friend

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 remade it with the occult, the antebellum South, and a theology of consequence so precise that when Alan Parker adapted it in 1987, the 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.

Falling Angel appeared in 1978, serialized first in Playboy, and won the magazine’s Editorial Award for Best Major Work — beating that year 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 and to the kind of attention the novel had not received on its own. Parker wrote the screenplay adaptation; 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. His early novels — Alp (1969) and Gray Matters (1971) — had announced an experimental temperament that would never settle in one mode. 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.

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 approximately 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 spent more time on it than on anything else he produced.

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. Friends remembered a man of substantial warmth and a laugh one witness described as resembling a chainsaw, who was teaching his grandchildren to fish in Paradise Valley and finishing a sequel to Falling Angel — to be called Angel’s Inferno — when pancreatic cancer was diagnosed in early March 2017.

He died on April 22, 2017, in Livingston, Montana, at seventy-six. Angel’s Inferno was published posthumously 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, Falling Angel, Legend, Richard Brautigan