Hardboiled Falling Angel and Voodoo in Central Park

Falling Angel  ( 1978 )  by William Hjortsberg is probably known to an audience through the movie Angel Heart from 1987, directed by Allan Parker and starring a messed up Mickey Rourke, a slick Robert de Niro and a drop-dead gorgeous Lisa Bonet.

It seems I read a lot of books made into movies. However I usually get a hold of the novel first and then some clever little screenwriter gets a hold of the same novel and makes a movie out of it, sells the idea to a director then it gets made, preferably staring some big glittering Hollywood actor. Well, what can I say? Great minds think alike?

It’s an odd experience watching the movie made out of the book you’ve read. It either coincides with what you’ve envisioned or it doesn’t. This novel for instance does a very good job of describing New York City in 1959 – Times square, Central Park voodoo rituals, Coney island off season. Eisenhower was president, cars had all the tailfins and chrome you can wish for… Harry Angel takes you around the city, into the jazz clubs and favourite restaurants, some of them very fancy (because that’s where you’ll find Louis Cyphre having some eggs), down to the mean streets and less pleasant neighbourhoods. The movie moves the action down south. Louisiana and voodoo go together in the public mind. I find I prefer the idea of the voodoo ceremony taking place in Central Park and devil worship in the abandoned subway stations under the city.

The story is a very basic hardboiled detective story. You can almost hear the Raymond Chandler/ film noir/Dashiell Hammett/Humphrey Bogart voice-over come in as you read the first line: ”It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday’s snowstorm lingered in the streets like a leftover curse”. Now, I’m not overly fond of the detective genre. To be quite frank I never read the stuff because it bores me. There are several different reasons for this, mostly connected with the genre conventions, but I do enjoy real classic Noir as it was meant to be. All the women are “dames” and the men wear hats and drink more whiskey in a day than is prudent for a small alcoholic elephant and survive the most absurd knocks on the head with no ill side effects… this is one of those kinds of stories. Thrown in on top of that you have the devil as your client – oh, don’t worry I’m not really giving anything away here, the alias he uses us Louis Cyphre – doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.

Harry Angel is hired to find the singer Johnny Liebling, better known under his stagename Johnny Favourite. The trail is stone cold since Johnny hasn’t been around since the war. He was drafted and got shot in the head and has been vegetating decorously in an upstate hospital for at least a decade. Or has he? Every lead Harry Angel follows leads to a brutal bloody murder, some of which he himself gets implicated in. He manages to fall in love with a beautiful voodoo priestess called Evangeline Proudfoot and, as I have mentioned earlier, gets knocked on the head an impressive number of times in the course of the action.

It’s the thoroughly enjoyable clash of two genres, horror and noir, with all the conventions you could wish for cooked down to hard liquor. It has well-written and interesting scenery, dark rituals at midnight and all the sex and violence you can stomach. And at its root it is the same basic question as all Mephistophelian tales, best expressed in the gospel according to Mark: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Mule