southpaw@altavista.net
Thu, 11 Nov 1999 15:14:22 -0400
<
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/11/09/timobiobi02002.ht
ml?999>
Chronicler of small-time mobsters: Higgins on a visit to
London in 1985
GEORGE V. HIGGINS
George V. Higgins, novelist, was found dead at his home in
Milton, Massachusetts, on November 6 aged 59. He was born on
November 13, 1939.
Although he published more than 25 books in as many years
from the early 1970s onwards, his debut novel, The Friends of
Eddie Coyle (1972), is always to the fore when the work of
George V. Higgins is discussed. With its dialogue forged from
the speech of the small-town gangsters of Massachusetts,
Eddie Coyle and its successors set the pattern for such crime
writers as Elmore Leonard, aiming to hold the reader's
attention not so much with plot and incident as through the
interest inherent in the workings of the criminal mind.
Higgins had unrivalled first-hand experience of the world he
took as his literary milieu. For 17 years he practised
criminal law in Massachusetts, serving as a federal
prosecutor for several of them. Indeed, though his earnings
from writing had completely emancipated him from the need to
appear at the Bar again, he liked to say that if a really
interesting case came up, he would like to take it on.
Although he lived and worked for most of his life in a small
corner of one of America's smallest states, and in his
writings eschewed the glamorous settings favoured by some of
his crimewriting peers, George Vincent Higgins had led a far
from sheltered life. Born in Brockton, Massachusetts, he went
to school in nearby Rockland from where he entered Boston
College. At his parents' insistence he embarked on the study
of engineering, but soon switched to English, graduating in
1961 and going on to Stanford where he took a master's
degree.
With this education under his belt he took work as a truck
driver, learning at the same time "to swear between
syllables". He next went as a reporter to the Providence,
Rhode Island, Journal and Evening Bulletin and from there to
the Associated Press bureau at Springfield, Massachusetts. It
was there, covering trials for AP, that he first ran up
against the small-time crooks of the type who people his
novels.
Some of the inept performances he witnessed from both Bar and
Bench persuaded Higgins that he might do very much better
himself, and in 1963 he returned to Boston College to read
law. Qualifying in 1967, he was admitted to the Massachusetts
Bar and was soon involved in cases for the Massachusetts
Attorney-General's office in Boston, rising to become the
state's assistant attorney-general. In a period of bitter
rivalry between Irish and Italian Mafia gangs in the city, he
not only built up a formidable reputation, but was also
garnering a store of notes for future novels. From 1970 to
1973 he was a federal prosecutor in Boston.
Higgins had started writing in 1961 a series of high-minded
literary novels containing "long, Faulknerian sentences that
even I could not understand". No one wanted to publish them
so, realising the futility of this, he began to quarry his
personal experience for literary purposes.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle was an instant success. Higgins's
determination to let his characters tell their own stories,
to impart their own motives to the reader and, as it were,
run the novel themselves, was something new in crime fiction.
Eddie Coyle actually did
- as some of its successors did not - have a taut plot, but
that was not its great strength. Its success came from the
sense of its being embedded in the reality of the streets. It
was made into a film in 1973, with Robert Mitchum playing
Coyle, an ageing hood who has turned police informer, and is
the target of his former associates.
The Digger's Game (1973) and Cogan's Trade (1974), set in the
same background, followed Eddie Coyle on to the bestseller
lists but did not make the transition to celluloid. Higgins's
close interest in the legal side of the Watergate case
against President Nixon and his associates led to two books:
the novel A City on a Hill and a non-fiction study, The
Friends of Richard Nixon (both 1975).
It was a feature of Higgins's books that the interest lay not
so much in the solution of crime, but in the means by which
the law pursues the criminal. In real life Higgins had
revelled in this and once described the work of the
prosecuting attorney as being "the last officially-sponsored
blood sport".
Perhaps this close association with the processes of the law
had some drawbacks. There were those among ordinary readers
who found his legal mazes difficult to negotiate. And
Higgins's touch was not quite so sure when he strayed from
his Boston background to the Washington political underworld.
Although he continued prolific - his last novel, The Agent
appeared last April - he never again quite matched the
runaway success of Eddie Coyle.
Higgins was apt to be nostalgic for his days as a federal
prosecutor and the thrill of taking on the big mobs. "In
matters of crime," he said in an interview earlier this year,
"America is definitely in a lull. It's the twilight of the
gangsters. The feds nailed most of the bosses and the chances
are that those guys will never see the sunshine again outside
the exercise yard." Latterly he divided his time between his
books and teaching creative writing at Boston
University.
George Higgins is survived by his wife Loretta and by the son
and daughter of a previous marriage which was dissolved. His
first wife Betty died in 1986.
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