The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Although you can guess how it ends, this novel impresses for the near perfection of its execution. Most of the story is told through conversations, and the reader slowly comes to know the characters through these conversations, some of them pretty funny in a very dark way, rather than a lot of narrative, . Eddie Coyle is a small time crook who is in trouble. He's about to be sentenced and he doesn't want to go to jail. How far will he go to keep out? This is claustrophobic noir fiction in the same vein as Hammett's The Glass Key or Sallis's Drive. And if you've ever seen a Tarantino movie, you have to figure this is a book he read and remembered, although unlike much of Tarantino's clever but artificial dialogue, Higgins' characters show more sound like real people speaking in a real way. show less

The Friends of Eddie Coyle may be one of the most influential neo-noirs of the 20th century. The titular Eddie Coyle is a small time gunrunner and mob affiliate facing a few years of Federal prison time. Aside from his career, he's basically a middle class guy, and he doesn't want to spend a couple years on ice away from his wife and kids. The only way out is to give the cops enough evidence on someone more interesting to get his bootlegging charges dropped. Meanwhile, other small time hoods are running their own schemes: selling machine guns to political radicals, robbing banks, and running a bar/mafia answer service, all under the knowledge that any of them might turn rat.

The story unfolds through looping, discursive, incredibly show more realistic dialog. These are guys with a lot of street smarts and not a lot of wisdom, trying to put together their deals, feel out the other side, and mostly gripe about their lot in life. Nobody including the cops, who are just another set of crime adjacent working stiffs, has anything approaching the whole picture.

Just a gorgeously bleak and cynical book. show less

This 1971 crime novel is probably the most dialogue intense book I have ever read. The story is told through the conversations of a number of characters. Very stylish and very tight storytelling. I can see why this would be quickly adapted to a movie. It isn't a long novel but like a good film I felt like I got to know a few of the characters in the short time we spend with them. None of them are people you'd want to know. None of them are friends despite the title. They are all crime punks and someone is going down. These guys have a code, but it is mostly based on fear. Fear of what will happen to you if you give someone a bum deal or rat them out a little. Eddie gets a bum deal. This is good intense stuff and a must read for fans of show more the genre. I never saw the film but now I want to. I felt sorry for some of these guys, especially Eddie. 3 1/2 - 4 stars show less

Decades after seeing Peter Yates's extraordinary film version of George V. Higgins's novel THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, I finally got around to reading the book, which has a reputation for greatness commensurate with the film's. I love the film deeply. Now I love the book the same way. Higgins, whose first published novel this was, has, as almost every critic has noted, a preternatural gift for startlingly real dialog. Much of the book is written in dialog. None of it is precious or self-consciously "real." It simply is real. Just about every phrase sounds as though it had been recorded verbatim from actual conversation, yet none of it contains the painful gracelessness of actual everyday speech. Every character sounds colorful, but show more there's no pretense about it, no visible brush strokes. Higgins at the time he wrote this book was an Assistant United States Attorney, and his knowledge of the world of criminals and the law was authentic. This story, about a range of criminals, each connected in some way with a small-time crook named Eddie Coyle, and the law enforcement figures who oppose them go about their activities during a brief period of time. That Eddie Coyle is coming up for sentencing on a minor felony is the hinge upon which all the elements of the story turn. One gets the feeling reading the book that this must be what life for the average criminal and lawman is really like -- often dull or commonplace, punctuated by violence and folly, spoiled or accomplished with large helpings of coincidence and error. This book makes me very much want to read Higgins's other works. (And interpolated kudos to whoever thought to have Robert Mitchum play Eddie Coyle. It's a role one would think no one would consider Mitchum for, yet it became one of his very best and most successfully executed.) show less

What kind of person will smash a man in the face with a gun for money? Noir, realistic fiction does not go in for soppy sentimentality about mobsters. These are bad people, defective human beings.

The natural comparison for me is Westlake's Parker novels. My brief (n=2) exposure to Parker suggests that Higgins is more the realist. Both are excellent stylists, although one is getting a terse, minimalistic style. Westlake is probably the better writer, but Higgins has the straight dope. Not for him the one-man-army of Parker in The Hunter.

Let me pose another question. How do you open a time-lock safe without explosive expertise, or safe-cracking expertise? What is the weakness in the system? The weakness is man. Show up at the bank show more president's house, put a gun to his wife's head, and he himself will open the safe.

That heist logic, repeated four times, forms the core of "Eddie Coyle." The passage that will remain with me, is one such bank president, his wife and children hostage, waiting for the time-lock to open. He recalls a vacation, where he finds himself four feet away from a timber rattler. After a paralyzed eternity, the snake slithers off into the grass, but throughout the vacation, he, his wife, his children, step more carefully through the grass. That's the way life is, care-free until it isn't. And once it isn't, it never will be again. show less

George V. Higgins had an unusual background for a writer of crime novels. As a Deputy Assistant Attorney General and an Assistant United States Attorney, he spent 7 years focusing on prosecution of organized-crime. He then spent ten years in private practice as an attorney (representing such figures as Gordon Liddy and Eldredge Cleaver), contributed as a journalist and newspaper columnist, and served on the faculty at Boston College and Boston University. Higgins' background in the law and organized crime is reflected in his novels, including this one, his first such contribution.

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" holds an iconic status in crime novels, being highly regarded and heavily praised by such writers as Ross MacDonald. Indeed, show more Elmore Leonard called it "the best crime novel ever written." Nevertheless, some readers have trouble with the work, as it transcends the formulaic. The novel is mainly told through dialogue, and the reader's full attention is sometimes required to determine who is speaking. (Early in the novel, characters are described but not named, and only eventually does one learn that "the stocky man" is Eddie himself). As described in the Wikipedia page on the author, "Higgins was proud of his skill in rendering dialogue with great accuracy.... He was also an expert in lending atmosphere to a series of harsh or barren facts, inducing his readers to figure out important things artfully implied in the text but never stated."

This novel depicts the Irish- American underworld in Boston, and is populated by small-time criminals that are entirely unlike the romanticized depictions in such works as The Godfather. Indeed, they have to scramble for money, have nagging wives, and worry about paying their monthly bills. Eddie has been making money by supplying pistols to a small gang of bankrobbers. He had been nabbed while transporting a hijacked truckload of liquor, and is facing a prison sentence that he is desperate to avoid. Under pressure from the feds, he reluctantly agrees to turn informant. His timing is off; identity of the bankrobbers is revealed by a disgruntled girlfriend, but Eddie is blamed, and is finally executed by one of his "friends". .

The irony of the title lies in the fact that Eddie has no real friends; all of the characters are out for what they can get, in this, the hard-scrabble life of the small time criminal. My own reaction to the novel was mixed. I appreciated the originality of its style and its reliance on realistic dialogue to tell its story, but I didn't find it as gripping or entertaining as some crime novels of the more conventional sort. Overall, I think the novel grows on the reader, so perhaps a second reading would be beneficial.

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" was made into a film, starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle. The movie not only sticks close to the book's plot and tone, but adopts much of the dialogue right from the book. show less

Stumbled onto this one to as a lark- i had heard of it and there it was attractively shown at my library, with great write-ups attached ("best crime novel ever" ... words to that effect by ... Lehane?) Not sure i would go that far, but this is a fantastic, immediately grabbing book. Very fast read... the story of Eddie "Fingers" Coyle - low level (?) gun runner who is in trouble with the law and so has to consider turning rat to save himself. The story wends and winds all over grubby crimes (bank robberies and so forth), introducing a bevy of characters (with a capital C). Story is great, but i am burying the lead here... it is is language / dialog that carries this book to such heights. i can't speak to authenticity (what do i know) show more but it sounds so true and so appropriately targeted. A veritable confederacy of dunces for boston low life criminal language. Just loved it and will see about more of Higgins. show less