Mark wrote
- I'm sort of surprised only Mario and I have mentioned
George V Higgins. Was he a criminal lawyer that defended the
type of people he writes about in his early books? I have
recently seen some of his later books usually featuring
lawyers as protagonists. If you have read them, do they come
close to being as good as his early books? I am willing to
read non hard boiled if they are worthwhile
the Jeremiah Healy wrote
> As to George V. Higgins, he was a difficult man to
know, so I was never
> privy to any of his own views on his writing prior
to his death.
Yes, surely if there is one under-rated writer in modern -
not just noir - fiction it is Higgins. For my money The
Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the two or three best novels
of the past fifty years. It prefigures an enormous amount of
contemporary noir. The use of dialogue was a huge
acknowledged influence on Elmore Leonard. And Higgins had
hoods talking about trivia before murdering people a good two
decades before Tarantino (it is surely no coincidence that
the first line of Eddie Coyle refers to a character called
Jackie Brown)
It's become conventional wisdom to say that nothing else
Higgins wrote was as good - and while that's true inasmuch as
Coyle is a masterpiece - there are a whole bunch of other
books that aren't far behind. Personal favourites include, in
the hardboiled vein - The Digger's Game, Patriot Games and
The Rat On Fire - or in his more political vein - Impostors,
Outlaws and his own favourite the epic A Choice of Enemies.
His last two novels The Agent and particularly his swansong
the prophetically titled At End OF Day are both really good
books. Of course it's true that the use of dialogue could
become stylised - though I defy any writer not to be
impressed by the eighty page conversation in a parked car
that kicks off Bomber's Law.
To my mind his least satisfying books are his one attempt at
a series the Jerry Kennedy novel (Kennedy for the Defence at
al ) which tend to the arch.
As to his legal background, Higgins worked for the DA before
setting up in private practice as a criminal lawyer. Later he
taught creative writing. He was indeed a hard man to know,
one who didn't suffer fools gladly, and was for a long time
unhappy to be classified as a crime writer (later though he
mellowed and once told me that to be thought of in the same
league as Leonard or Ross Thomas was fine by him). If
anyone's interested in knowing more about Higgins, there's a
long interview with him in my book Into The Badlands, along
with some rather jaundiced commentary on the fair city of
Boston.
John
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