Review: "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" by George V. Higgins

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins     reviewed by Mike Baker     Eddie Coyle is a low-level Boston criminal, and he has a problem. After getting arrested for driving a hijacked truck through Vermont, he was convicted and is now out on bail, awaiting sentencing. His solution to the prospect of going to jail? He’s willing to snitch on a fellow criminal. But the police want more from Coyle—they want him to roll on even more associates, which creates a whole new problem for him. Meanwhile, Phil Scalisi is in the bank-robbing business with three other mob-connected hoods, and business is good. Eddie knows about Phil’s bank job, so you can probably see how this might develop into a problem for both Phil and especially for Eddie. And you can already guess how things might unfold. The cops and robbers dynamic heats up, and shenanigans ensue. This book gets a lot of praise—Best Crime Novel Ever. Best Dialogue Ever. I won’t go 100% on either of those claims, but it’s pretty goddamn good. The dialogue never feels stilted or expository. It never gets cumbersome.  Also, it has a loose narrative structure, shifting from character to character without getting bogged down in unnecessary details. George V. Higgins leaves a lot of the work up to the reader. He doesn’t say much explicitly, and pieces of the story are intentionally left out. It’s enough to keep the plot moving, but an engaged reader will start to make assumptions. These gaps—these moments of narrative uncertainty—create a sense of wobbling momentum as things start to unravel. The reader is taken on a perilous ride, with the plot hurtling forward, sometimes faster than you can keep up. If you’ve seen the movie Killing Them Softly, you might get a sense of what I’m talking about. That film is based on Cogan’s Trade, another Higgins classic, and sticks closely to his narrative style. Friends of Eddie Coyle is, in my view, the best example of lessons learned from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Is this book the best? I don’t know. But what I do know is that every word rings true, every sentence flows into the next*. It feels like the end of the night at a bar, and some guy is telling you a story that you’re sure is bullshit—right up until the end, when he hits you with the twist and you realize you just spent the evening getting drunk with Elvis. *            *            * *There’s a phenomenon where, when reading a text, if you come across a word you don’t know and can’t figure out from context or don’t bother to look up, your understanding of everything else becomes slightly diminished. Every unknown word in the text that you can’t decipher or don’t take the time to understand compounds this effect. I believe there’s a similar concept in fiction. False notes, off-putting inconsistencies, or unintentional character flaws—these things pull us out of the narrative and create a kind of psychic drag that slows us down. Look, I read Cormac McCarthy slowly because his writing is dense and complicated. But I read Nick Carter slowly because every other sentence feels fake and hollow.

Check out The Friends of Eddie Coyle at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.