Rating: 8/10
- Plot: An ageing Boston gunrunner facing prison weighs whether to inform, while the people around him are doing the same calculation.
- Clues: Not a puzzle; the reader pieces together who is betraying whom from overheard talk.
- Reveal: Quiet and brutal, and all the more shocking for its matter-of-fact delivery.
Eddie Coyle is a small-time Boston criminal with a conviction pending in New Hampshire for driving a truckload of stolen goods. He is looking at prison, and he has a family. So he sells guns to a crew of bank robbers and considers giving information to a federal agent, Dave Foley, in exchange for help with his sentence.
George V. Higgins was an assistant US attorney who had listened to countless wiretaps and informers. What he brought to the novel was an ear. The book is almost entirely dialogue: long, digressive, funny, profane conversations in which criminals and cops talk about everything except what they mean. Plot emerges sideways from the talk.
The effect was revolutionary. Crime fiction had featured tough talk before, but never with this kind of documentary texture. Elmore Leonard, Richard Price and the makers of The Wire all learned from it.
Eddie himself is a sad, likeable, worn-out man, and the book’s emotional power comes from watching him try to outmanoeuvre forces he can’t see. Everyone is a friend of Eddie Coyle, and nobody is.
The style is also the barrier. Readers must work to follow who is who and what is being arranged. There is little description and no narrative guidance.
The 8 reflects a short, original, influential novel whose ending lands like a slap. The 1973 film with Robert Mitchum is also a small classic.
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