The Friends of Eddie Coyle

by George V. Higgins

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.

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.

“I was thinking about joining a commune,” the black man said. “I heard about this place up near Lowell, everybody welcome, you take off your clothes and screw all day and drink boysenberry wine all night. Trouble is, I hear all they get to eat is turnips.”

he’s so relieved when I start asking about something else it’s like he finally took a piss after four days of drinking beer.