Private eyes and evil eyes
Horror noir in Falling Angel by William Hjorstberg (1978) and Angel Heart (1987)
Note to readers: I will be taking a break from this newsletter for the rest of May. See you guys in June with some fun stuff!
Over in The Gray Lady1, Sarah Weinman compiled a tally of must-read private eye novels. Classics, for sure, from Raymond Chandler to Ross MacDonald, to more contemporary, and perhaps lesser-known, works like Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt (which is indeed fantastic, by the way.) Weinman prefaces the list by positing that, perhaps, the PI novel may be ripe for a renaissance. A perennial form finding new readers.
Why, though? What is it about the private eye novel that might resonate today? There are, I think, two reasons why this subgenre of crime fiction could feel newly, even painfully relevant. Call these reasons status, and money.
Say you have a mystery where the protagonist doing the detecting is a police detective, or an FBI agent. That character has a whole structure, a whole institution, behind her. Perhaps this gives her access to resources. Perhaps the institutional culture is so hidebound that she has to work against it to do her job. That institution shapes the story, and the character, every step of the way.
A private investigator has no such institutional affiliation. That gives her a certain kind of freedom, yes, as she’s not answering to some sergeant behind who doesn’t understand how her loose cannon methods still bring in results, dammit! But it also means she can’t send samples off to the lab for a 24 hour workaround. She has to do everything herself.
Like everyone else, basically. That is a widely shared feeling nowadays! So many of us are gig workers, herding nomadically from one job to the next. And even if you have a steady job at a larger institution, it can feel like you’re the only one who cares about the work you’re doing.
And speaking of gig worker: the other appealing factor of the private eye is that she is nearly always broke. The aforementioned Claire DeWitt, Philip Marlowe, Angela Gennaro—these characters are all scraping by, one case to the next. Which, relatable! Just about everyone who isn’t a billionaire feels, not without cause, like they are one bad break from being broke themselves.
Wait, where did that button come from? Weird!
The private eye, then, is a protagonist who is especially vulnerable to danger and misfortune. And since she encounters those phenomena frequently in her line of work, it is more than likely that she’ll be tainted by it.
One of my favorite examples of the private eye genre I’ve recently encountered, and which is featured in the NYT list, is Falling Angel by William Hjorstberg. Falling Angel was published in 1978; nine years later, it was was made into a movie, retitled Angel Heart2 for some reason. The original was too literary, maybe? Too spooky?
Book and movie both feature the same setup: It’s New York City in the late 1950s, and private detective Harry Angel gets a call one morning. A client named Louis Cyphre needs Angel to work a missing-persons job. A wartime crooner named Johnny Favorite, a kind of Frank Sinatra before the fact, has been absent for years. Favorite owes Cyphre money. Of course, Angel takes the case.
Angel quickly learns that Favorite was involved in various forms of the occult: voodoo, astrology, herbalism. This is where the horror element of this noir story appears, which will prove decisive, fatefully so. Writers nowadays are always trying to mix genres, concocting some new flavor that will attract different readerships in our age of fragmentation. Yet Hjorstberg did it all the way back in the 70s, meshing The Big Sleep with Rosemary’s Baby and making it look easy.
Angel keeps trying to find Favorite. In the process, people keep dying, brutally. An astrologer Angel visits turns up dead the next day, her heart literally cut out. Strange rituals are conducted under cover of night. A voodoo summoning that involves killing a chicken; a Satanic black mass that features human sacrifice. Grim stuff indeed.
We learn more about Angel too. He’s from Wisconsin originally. He served in WWII briefly, getting discharged after suffering a wound while stationed in north Africa. Back then, he found himself wandering Times Square on New Year’s Eve, 1943, at which point…his memory grows hazy.
Falling Angel, the novel, sticks to New York City. The black mass is held in a subway tunnel, which sounds like a joke made by Midwesterners who are scared to ride the subway. Angel Heart, the movie, leaves town. Angel, played by Mickey Rourke, follows Favorite’s trail down to New Orleans, which allows him to get all sweaty and sultry. Good call, honestly—Rourke looks great with sweat-stained pits.
If you’re like me, you didn’t see the ending coming right until it was top of you. If you’re unlike me, you saw it coming it from a mile away. The clues are all there, literally spelled out in some cases. But I am a deeply gullible reader, and thus it took me by surprise.
Spoiler: that gap in Angel’s memory, at Times Square on New Year’s 1943? There’s a reason for it. Angel was intercepted—by none other than Johnny Favorite. He led Angel away and performed a black magick rite on him, as a means of transferring his soul into Angel’s body. This was Favorite’s means of hiding from the figure who first made him a famous singer in the first place, trading eternal salvation for worldly success. A literal deal with the devil. As in…Louis Cyphre.
Louis Cyphre? Lucifer? Get it?
Favorite, like Robert Johnson in blues legend, made a deal with Cyphre/Lucifer for fame and riches. Eventually, though, Lucifer comes calling for what’s owed him. But Favorite, like Mr C. in Twin Peaks: The Return, created a decoy in the form of Angel, living on in him unawares. Until Cyphre puts it all together, and Angel/Favorite’s soul is his last.
An old American story, to be sure. The deal with the devil, the soul at the crossroads. But the noir setting lends an unexpected poignance to the story. Angel, recall, is a veteran of WWII. Seeing only brief action, yes, but he’s still hospitalized for it. And after Favorite casts the black magick spell on him, he literally cannot remember what happened. The memory is repressed. Angel is traumatized without even being aware of it.
The 1950s are an era that’s been nostalgized countless times over, by many different parties for many different reasons. One thing that gets lost amidst the sock hops, though, is that the era saw virtually an entire generation of men return home from war deeply shaken by their experiences, and effectively unable to talk about it. This was trauma at a societal scale. You’d have to look back nearly a hundred years earlier, to the aftermath of the Civil War, to find a comparable phenomenon.
Almost without even trying, the noir and horror trappings of Falling Angel suggest that depth of trauma, that vacuum of silence, which existed in society at the time. That very effortlessness suggests such genre staples may be more effective at feeling out the shape of trauma than more realistic means. As if reality is too real to be described on its own.
Leave it to the private eye to uncover truths no one else can.
Legacy print media? Boo! Hiss! (Hook me up with a byline tho)
Available on Kanopy, the free streaming service available through public libraries. Highly recommend!