Kemper's Reviews > The Friends of Eddie Coyle

With friends like these, you certainly wouldn’t need any enemies…

Eddie Coyle is a low-level Boston mobster facing serious prison time after getting arrested for driving a truck of hijacked liquor. While awaiting his sentencing, Eddie tries to buy guns to supply to some buddies who have been robbing banks, but he’s also angling to rat out his gun dealer to the cops in order to get out of going to jail.

I’ve been hearing about this book for quite a while, and I was worried that it couldn’t live up to its reputation. When guys like Elmore Leonard are calling it the greatest crime novel ever written, that’s a high bar to clear. While I probably wouldn’t go quite that far, it’s easy to see why it’s so highly praised.

It’s deceptively simple in that it’s mainly just dialogue with little set-up so it takes a minute to understand who these characters are and what they’re talking about. It’s on the reader to fill in the story based on these conversations, but when it comes together near the end, you realize what a neat trick that George Higgins pulled off.

Higgins was an assistant US attorney in Massachusetts, and his first book has a casual authenticity that a couple of generations of crime writers would kill their own mothers to have. The cops are less interested in seeing justice done than they are in getting the guy they’ve currently got by the balls into giving them someone higher in the food chain to get them to relax their grip a bit. The guys who make their living from crime are aware that anyone in a pinch is a potential rat no matter how solid they’ve been in the past. The name of the game is having info on someone doing something worse than you and feeding them to the system.

I checked out the movie version starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle after reading it and found that it also deserves its reputation. There’s just something about the ‘70s that give good crime movies of the era a nice sleazy feel.