On "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," by George V. Higgins
Last week I finally got around to Higgins’s 1971 classic, which had been languishing on my list for a long time, and it did not disappoint. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is peerless crime fiction of unusual savagery and cynicism, set in a milieu of 1970 back-alley Boston in all its shabby, sordid grime. What distinguishes this book is not so much the famous dialogue - which is indeed possibly the best noir dialogue ever written, funny and profane - as its nearly Elizabethan sense of fatalism. The Friends of Eddie Coyle - and the title, as an admiring Dennis Lehane points out in his foreword, is potently, grimly ironic - has nothing even close to a sympathetic character, and its plot turns on the very darkest and most random of treacheries. The lowlife characters who populate the book are sketched vividly and efficiently, but without a sliver of remorse or affection; Higgins makes even hard-boiled crime fiction seem soft and sentimental. The climactic scene takes place during, and after, a night of drinking at a Bruins game and in the gritty working-class bars around North Station. Talk about atmosphere.