The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Lawyer, journalist, and teacher, George V. Higgins was the author of more than thirty books. He died in 1999.

ALSO BY GEORGE V. HIGGINS

Fiction

The Digger’s Game

Cogan’s Trade

A City on a Hill

The Judgment of Deke Hunter

Dreamland

A Year or So with Edgar

Kennedy for the Defense
(Jerry Kennedy series)

The Rat on Fire

The Patriot Game

A Choice of Enemies

Old Earl Died Pulling Traps: A Story

Penance for Jerry Kennedy
(Jerry Kennedy series)

Imposters

Outlaws

The Sins of the Fathers

Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years

Trust

Victories

The Mandeville Talent

Defending Billy Ryan
(Jerry Kennedy series)

Bomber’s Law

Swan Boats at Four

Sandra Nichols Found Dead
(Jerry Kennedy series)

A Change of Gravity

The Agent

At End of Day

Nonfiction

The Friends of Richard Nixon

The Progress of the Seasons

Style Versus Substance

On Writing

Praise for
The Friends of Eddie Coyle

“One of the best of its genre I have read since Hemingway’s
The Killers.
”

—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
The New York Times

“What dialogue . . . The American writer who is closest to Henry Green. What I can’t get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz.”

—Norman Mailer

“Aspiring novelists of any genre, not just legal suspense, would be wise to read lots of George Higgins.”

—John Grisham

“A writer of Balzacian appetite . . . the poet of Boston sleaze . . . confident and totally convincing.”

—Mordecai Richler

“Higgins can plot a whole book like one long chase scene. He can write dialogue so authentic it spits. He can catch character like a ‘make’ in a file of mug shots. . . . This cops-and-robbers novel qualifies him for the corner table where all the best tellers of low tales sit.”

—
Life

“George V. Higgins was an American original and a writer of lasting importance.”

—Scott Turow

George V. Higgins

Picador

Henry Holt and Company
New York

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE.
Copyright © 1970, 1971 by
George V. Higgins. Introduction copyright © 2010 by Dennis
Lehane. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of
America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.picadorusa.com

Picador
^®
is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Henry Holt
and Company under license from Pan Books Limited.

For information on Picador Reading Group Guides,
please contact Picador.
E-mail: [email protected]

A part of chapter 6 appeared in a different form under the title
“Dillon Explained That He Was Frightened” in
North
American Review
, Fall 1970.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Henry Holt edition as follows:

Higgins, George V., 1939–

The friends of Eddie Coyle : a novel / George V. Higgins.—1st Owl Book ed.

p. cm.

“An Owl book.”

ISBN 978-0-805-04152-4

1. Criminals—Fiction. 2. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.I356 F7 1995

813'.54—dc20

95014538

Picador ISBN 978-0-312-42969-0

First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

First Picador Edition: May 2010

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You hold in your hands the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years. It is also quite possibly one of the four or five best crime novels ever written. It casts such a long shadow that all of us who toil in the genre known as American noir do so in its shade. Same goes for all of us who write novels set in Boston. How can a slim book with minimal description and no heroes lay claim to the status of modern masterpiece?

Let’s start with the title,
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
. Eddie Coyle has no friends. Eddie barely has acquaintances. Eddie Coyle is our hopeless, helpless, hapless Everyman in the Boston criminal underworld of 1970. He might be the worst guide ever, because he is utterly out of his depth. Or, on second thought, maybe he’s the best guide ever, because most of the people who swim in this sea
are
out of their depth, which is how they end up on the ten o’clock news or on a metal slab, doing ten-to-twelve
on C Block, or hanging from a post office wall. In Eddie Coyle’s world, no one is out to screw anyone on purpose; it just happens that way. No one wakes up trying to do bad or put a hurt on anyone; they’re just trying to get by, and sometimes getting by means leaving a fair share of accidental wreckage in your wake. But rest assured, it’s nothing personal.

The “friends” who surround Eddie are Jackie Brown, the not-as-slick-as-he-thinks gunrunner; Dave Foley, the pitiless Federal agent; the bank robbers Artie Van and Jimmy Scalisi; and Dillon, a full-time bartender and part-time hit man. Jackie sells guns to Eddie, who passes them along to Artie and Jimmy, who need them to rob banks in the suburbs south of the city. Eddie is facing jail time and he’d love to get out of it. The only way he can do that is provide information on upcoming crimes to Dave Foley, who doesn’t hand out Get Out of Jail Free cards for nothing. Dave uses Eddie as much, if not more so, than he assumes Eddie would use him. (
Everyone
, by the way,
uses everyone
in this novel.) While Foley presses Eddie to get him harder and harder evidence on his “friends,” Eddie tries to maintain a semblance of loyalty. Problem is, all his “friends” know he’s facing hard time, so everyone worries he’s talking to a guy like Foley. Maybe saddest and most ironic of all is that while Eddie is talking to Foley, he isn’t telling him much, but someone else, whom nobody suspects,
is
blabbing away to Foley. Unfortunately for Eddie, no one suspects that other “friend” of being a rat; they only suspect Eddie. As his date with prison nears, that suspicion becomes the vise that closes in on Eddie, its teeth colder and closer with every chapter.

In most novels, it’s easy to spot the good guys and the bad guys. In this novel, the late George V. Higgins refuses to truck
in easy morality. Relying on his own experience as an assistant U.S. attorney, Higgins pulls back the veneer on the real criminal underworld, not the romanticized version readers kept in their heads before
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
was published. There are no noble gangsters swept up in high tragedy in Higgins’s world and no righteous cops obsessed with justice. There are only guys punching a clock, day in and day out; for some the job is to rob, to kidnap, or, in the case of Dillon, to kill. For others, the job is to arrest or prosecute. They’re working stiffs, essentially, and no one gets too hot and bothered about the work unless they think someone ratted them out. Near the end of the book, one character asks another, “Is there any end to this shit? Does anything ever change in this racket?” The other character responds, “Of course it changes. . . . Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes every day.”

This is the rat race Eddie runs in—a grimy, dingy world of grimy, dingy men. And if that’s all there was in this novel—a heroless, hyperrealistic view of a grim criminal subculture—it might not be worthy of its classic status. But we haven’t gotten to the dialogue. Ah, the dialogue. It takes up a good eighty percent of the novel, and you wouldn’t mind if it took up the full hundred. No one, before or since, has ever written dialogue this scabrous, this hysterically funny, this pungently authentic—not Elmore Leonard, who cites this novel as a primary influence, not Richard Price, not even George V. Higgins himself, who spent the rest of his career trying to fix what wasn’t broken, attempting to refine his dialogue in subsequent novels to such a degree of phonetic miscalculation that it became a near parody of the mastery on display here. Open any page of this book and you will find vast riches of the spoken word. The characters here
love to talk; they’d probably talk to a chair. Lucky for us, they have each other to talk to and what, at first blush, seems a novel of lowlifes doing low-life things until their time runs out, soon reveals itself to be a demented novel of manners, a brilliant satirical riff on all the hoary genre clichés that proceeded it. In most novels, talk is the salt and plot is the meal. In
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
, talk
is
the meal. It’s also the plot, the characters, the action, the whole shebang.

What we are left with—after all that flawless dialogue, after our tour of the dampest cellars of the criminal underclass, after we’ve hopscotched from antihero to loser to manipulative cop to a killer so banal and unaffected by what he does that the only moral principle he can find in his heart regards the price of a job, not the nature of it—is a portrait of life on the street as realistic as any ever written. So in the end Eddie Coyle did earn some friends—the legion of readers who consider him the greatest tragic antihero in the annals of crime fiction. When you finish his story, raise a glass to him. Here’s to Eddie Coyle. As with his creator, we’ll never see his like again.