Weekly Lizard

Introducing the Hit List—a new Weekly Lizard feature that gives writers the chance to share their must-read books and authors. For our inaugural post, Justin Peacock recommends George V. Higgins’s classic crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Do you agree? Don’t be shy—leave a comment and tell us what you think!

Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground that only 5,000 people bought their first record, but that every single one of them went on to start a band. I don’t know how many people have bought George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but it is certainly a book treasured by those of us who write crime fiction.

I first read Eddie Coyle shortly after graduating from college, and it immediately expanded my understanding of what a crime novel can be and do. Higgins, at the time a federal prosecutor, put his insider’s knowledge to good use, writing one of the most realistic and least glamorous depictions of small-time organized crime ever put on the page. Whether they intend to or not, most novels about criminals end up glamorizing a life of crime, but Eddie Coyle should be required reading in juvenile detention facilities nationwide. Yet for all its veracity, this is very much a book of stylistic artistry; the combination of thoroughly realistic subject matter delivered through vividly coarse yet operatic prose is precisely what makes the novel so unforgettable.

Eddie Coyle is a middle-aged, low-level hoodlum who is facing time on a failed hijacking. As his date with prison approaches, Eddie is trying to scratch out some money running guns for a group of bank robbers, while also turning informer for a not-particularly-trustworthy federal agent in hopes of keeping himself out jail.

The novel is populated with a memorable cast of lowlifes who are navigating a bleakly Hobbesian world in which trust is nonexistent and self-interest rules the day. Higgins’s criminals can be clever, but they are never actually smart. Eddie Coyle is also a startlingly accurate portrayal of the symbiotic relationships between crooks and cops, all of whom are constantly looking for angles and favors to trade.

Higgins is most renowned for his dialogue, a lyrical but streetwise argot that is his most pervasive influence. Dialogue drives the novel, revealing character while moving the story forward, but it’s also just a pleasure in its own right, as Higgins’s characters unleash profane arias that bring to mind not only Elmore Leonard (though the characters in a Leonard book are generally having a lot more fun) but also the films of Quentin Tarantino and the plays of David Mamet. Indeed, Higgins must be ranked as one of the great masters of American vernacular writing, a stylistic peer of Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is, ultimately, a tragedy. But it is a profane, witty, and gimlet-eyed tragedy, the work of a writer who fully understood how the world actually worked and wasn’t afraid to present it true.

—Justin Peacock