The Book You Have to Read: “The Digger’s Game,” by George V. Higgins

(Editor’s note: This is the 186th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Jerry “Digger” Doherty, a degenerate Boston gambler with a drinking problem, is once again in a jam. This time a Las Vegas junket run by the mob has left him in the hole for six figures, and he’s got no plan for paying it back. His usual go-to guy is his brother the Catholic Bishop, but his eminence has had enough of his wayward sibling. Lucky for the Digger there are others to do the thinking for him; and since his skill set is breaking and entering, that’s what the loan sharks have in mind, whether this ex-con likes it or not.

Hot on the heels of 1970’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (“the best crime novel ever written,” according to Elmore Leonard), and resembling Coyle in style and execution, George V. Higgins’ The Digger’s Game (1973) offers fly-on-the-wall observations of how the other half makes money, loses money—and attempts to make good on it. Considering the alternative, anyone who finds themselves behind the eight ball with the mob will do just about any type of dirty work to get themselves in the clear. In gangster logic (and anyone’s) it’s very simple. The Digger’s counselor-in-crime lays out the law of supply and demand for him just before a heist, in his estimation of a pep talk.

“Some guys,” the driver said, starting the Jaguar, “some guys need more’n they have, some guys have more’n they need. It’s just a matter of getting us together.”

Because the Digger can’t be trusted to raise the cash on his own, “the Greek” is brought in to help. An old-school mob enforcer, the Greek also happens to be regent for the enterprises of an imprisoned crime boss. Among the diverse holdings the Greek oversees on his behalf is a partnership with two young cologne-soaked sharpies who run the junket operation that allowed the penniless Digger to gamble on their dime. A source of irritation for the Greek, who’s ever mindful of money, is that those two hotshots rolled the dice on Digger just to fill an airplane seat, only to came up snake eyes.

“We hadda fill the plane,” Torry said. “We had fourteen beds at the hotel, we’re gonna have to pay for, at least one night, we don’t use them, the whole three nights, they don’t rent them to somebody else. Miller told me he was coming up empty, his other prospects. I said I’d see what I could do. So I tried the Digger.”

Richie the Greek said, “You hang around the wrong guys. You know them guys?”

And it doesn’t stop there. The trio butt heads once again when the youthful sharpies explain how they want to turn their junket operation into a legit business: a travel agency. As far as the Green is concerned, this would present problems. A paid secretary, expense accounts, and an office worthy of looking mainstream are components of their vision, but the Greek is from another generation. More comfortable with back-room dice games than welcoming newly flush marks to the jet set, he owes fealty to working-class characters from gritty places like Worcester and Providence; he’s only babysitting these two upstarts because he’s obligated to.

So this book is about two underworld figures, the Digger and the Greek, both with big problems. But as with any Higgins novel, there are more attractions here than simply the plot.

As a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts (and an ex-crime reporter), this author had experience with the criminal world, and anyone who’s read his work before can expect a signal strength of The Digger’s Game to be in how it captures the cadence and idioms of his characters’ dialogue. The son of exacting schoolteachers who read aloud to him, it was perhaps that which helped Higgins develop an ear later in life for the ways in which people—especially crooks, cops, lowlifes, and politicians—spoke. Capturing those peculiarities on the page helped put his readers into the thick of things. Yet, because Higgins’ books are driven by soliloquies in the patois and rhythm of Boston hard guys—“patterns of elision and compression that people use,” as he put it—stage direction and sense of location are nowhere to be seen. The reader must pay special attention to nuance. Some may balk at the challenge Higgins presents, but he had a careful, straightforward plan for his writing style. As he said, “Dialogue is character and character is plot.”

By following that maxim, Higgins made his stories ready for cinematic interpretation. Eddie Coyle made it to the big screen in 1973, starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle. Cogan’s Trade (1974), repackaged for moviehouses as Killing Them Softly, with Brad Pitt playing a hit man, never achieved the same renown.

The author of more than 30 books, most of them novels, Higgins also published on a variety of other subjects, including baseball, politics, and naturally, the art of writing. On Writing: Advice for Those Who Write to Publish (or Would Like To) reached print in 1990. In it, Higgins gives credit to his characters for the strength of his storytelling, and not to himself as their creator. It’s advice that any budding fictionist should heed. “I’m not writing dialogue because I like doing dialogue,” Higgins said. “The characters are telling you the story. I’m not telling the story.”

What’s Old Is New Again

There are a couple of newly reissued novels that you really ought to lay your hands on soon. The first is Picador’s 40th anniversary edition of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a work that Dennis Lehane, in his new introduction, calls “the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years” and “quite possibly one of the four or five best crime novels ever written.” Part of what distinguishes this gritty tale of Beantown thieves, mobsters, and small-time gunrunners from its literary brethren is its dialogue, “the louts and knuckleheads of Boston’s crime world running off at the mouth,” as another author, William Landay, explained in The Rap Sheet last summer. Higgins, a junior-grade federal prosecutor at the time he penned Eddie Coyle, had listened to many transcripts of trials, hearings, and interrogations, and tried to capture that authenticity in his prose, giving us crooks and assorted other lowlifes who Landay says “mumbled, stumbled, spoke in code, mangled common phrases; sometimes they made no sense at all.”

Also of note: The Leavenworth Case (Penguin Classics). Almost a decade before Sherlock Holmes’ initial appearance, Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935) introduced the first detective star of a book series. In The Leavenworth Case--a once-bestselling 1878 yarn, much lauded by Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White), but now largely forgotten--resolute Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police Force investigates the locked-mansion murder of Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy retired merchant and philanthropist. Was one of his nieces, set to inherit his fortune, behind this nefarious deed? Gryce and a rising young lawyer investigate, in a story that modern whodunit fans should not miss.

READ MORE: “Paperback Writers: Boston, Down and Dirty,” by Richard Rayner (Los Angeles Times); “Down and Out in Boston,” by Troy Patterson (Slate).

Three Masterpieces Etched in Stone

(Editor’s note: Boston lawyer, professor, and novelist George V. Higgins died a decade ago, at age 59, on November 6, 1999. Since then, many readers have forgotten his name, and others have failed to discover his novels at all. So we asked Brooklyn author Charlie Stella [Mafiya, Johnny Porno] for a little reminder of why Higgins’ literary contributions are still important. His response is posted below.)

Jackie Brown, at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.

That’s the opening line to what many writers cite as the greatest crime novel ever penned, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972). Ten years after the author’s death, it is truly an honor for me to pay tribute to my writing hero, George V. Higgins. As a student in a small college in North Dakota trying to come to terms with the fact I had no clue what I was doing there other than playing football, I was blessed the day Dave Gresham opened the paperback copy of Eddie Coyle and read the first chapter aloud to our class.

I knew people who talked like that; I had lived around them all my life. But until that English class, all I had read were sports biographies and history books. The little Shakespeare I had been forced to read gave me headaches.

People didn’t talk like this:

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

They talked like this:

“The day’s gonna come, it’s not here already. We’re gonna have to whack him out.”

One of the true masters of the crime-fiction genre, Higgins launched the reader in the moment through brilliant storytelling highlighted by what has become the standard by which fictional dialogue is judged. That said, being distinguished as a master of crime writing was a bittersweet pill for Higgins to swallow. He took issue with being pigeonholed as such and claimed to have written novels that had crimes in them, not crime novels.

Lord knows he never became a household name; except for Eddie Coyle most modern-day crime readers can’t name even one of Higgins’ books.

That fact, above all else, is sad.

The two novels that followed, The Digger’s Game (1973) and Cogan’s Trade (1974), were a pair of masterpieces equally as good as Eddie Coyle and were appreciated by readers more inclined to dismiss what passed for usual crime fare (commercially successful formulaic stories about private investigators, journalists, lawyers, etc., who pursue bad guys). Higgins’ many fans knew better. Such stories were as far flung from reality as Harry Potter.

Higgins wrote the other type of novel--the type very true to life about people in bad places (or just plain bad people) whose actions were predicated on survival. The world of Higgins’ first three books was dark and desperate and many of the crimes committed in them might well have been found on police blotters in any big city. Eddie Coyle, the Digger, and Jackie Cogan lived in a world where subterfuge, violence, and death were as common as a morning cup of coffee. Thus, their stories were a slice of urban Americana as undeniable as Fenway Park.

While reviewers were generally kind to books two and three, there was always that nagging qualifier regarding the likability of the inhabitants of The Digger’s Game and Cogan’s Trade and/or Higgins’ treatment of women. Those reviews always bothered me on several levels, but the one about women I found most disconcerting. Higgins’ women may not have been world beaters, but they couldn’t have been portrayed more accurately (as they were perceived by the men in his first three novels). Eddie, the Digger, and Cogan lived in an underworld stone age where women were foils; the women of Higgins’ first three novels, for better or worse, belonged there.

While it isn’t easy to like most of the characters in those novels, we’re sympathetic to Eddie and the Digger and both the jamokes fresh out of the can in Cogan’s Trade. We all know people who can’t get out of their own way, some more likable than others, but those down on their luck tend to get an empathetic nod. In the world of Higgins, they are the ultimate underdogs trying to make it day to day in an ultimate underdog existence.

Whether it was to discuss the purchase of guns (Eddie Coyle), the proper attire when about to perform a robbery (The Digger’s Game), or if a particular connected card game should be the target of a heist (Cogan’s Trade), Higgins saw no need for obiter dicta when fleshing out characters; their “speak” told their story. The treacherous world of Eddie Coyle was laid out in what Life magazine termed: “Dialogue so authentic it spits.”

All three novels served as social documentary featuring urban Darwinism; an overview of how man survives an underworld as close to a modern state of nature as it gets. Higgins didn’t present the romanticized Mario Puzo version of wiseguys and their associates, but rather how bottom dwellers survive mean streets. He dissected cops and robbers alike; what they are and what they become. In Eddie Coyle, Higgins left no stone unturned in exposing the world of an ex-convict looking to reduce an upcoming sentence while balancing the books at home and keeping his connected bank robber friends supplied with the tools of their trade; a hellish existence that rarely offers hope.

Higgins solidified his reputation as a master of dialogue with The Digger’s Game. Digger is in his early 40s and has a nagging wife and four kids. He also has a priest brother who is street-smart enough to know when Digger calls, it can’t be good. Digger went to Vegas, had a few too many martinis at the blackjack table, and ran up a gambling tab on a junket that has put him behind the eight ball (a familiar place for him). His brother, near retirement and fed up with bailing Digger out, says Digger couldn’t “get five thousand dollars together in a bank vault with a rake.” How Digger is going to handle his debts is the stuff nightmares are made of. He robs an office and a Cadillac, and of course those small scores aren’t enough (his life’s story).

Cogan’s Trade features a couple of recently released desperadoes who rip off a connected card game. One is a dog thief and his discourse makes for some of the most interesting, hilarious, and offbeat dialogue I’ve ever read. The man behind the future score is another ex-con, but he’s also an inveterate gambler prone to leaving trails through his bookmaker. Jackie Cogan is the man hired to restore order in the Boston underworld, and everyone pays a price when he metes out justice.

I’ve been flattered with comparisons to George V. Higgins, but those have been more-than-kind reviews. Higgins did a lot more than mimic street talk. He conveyed the essence of a character in just a few exchanges of what passed for idle chatter; conversations for the sake of conversations that provided social, political, and moral backgrounds without six pages of exposition. The knockaround guys we meet in these three books are revealed to have some of the same concerns we all do, and thus provide snapshots of an American subculture not so unlike what passes for mainstream. While today we find that subculture clearly on the wane, Higgins left us with three masterpieces forever etched in stone.

So, who’s got it better’n us?

The Book You Have to Read: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” by George V. Higgins

(Editor’s note: This is the 57th installment of our Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s choice comes from William Landay, who won the John Creasey Dagger Award for his first novel, He has since had published a second book: the historical crime thriller The Strangler [2007], about a Beantown family working both sides of the law during the fearful reign of the Boston Strangler. Check out Landay’s blog here.)

Imagine George V. Higgins around 1970 or so, as he contemplated the book that would become The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Thirty-one years old, he was a junior-grade federal prosecutor in Boston. For years Higgins had dreamed of becoming a writer. He was the son of two schoolteachers, and he had been writing novels since he was 15. But as an author, he was a flop. Publishers had consistently rejected him. Already he had more unpublished novels than he had fingers to count them. In person, he was a high-low character: bookish and long-faced, with a fancy graduate degree from Stanford in creative writing; but also charming, a double-eagle from Boston College with a gift of gab, at ease with cops and juries. He admired Ernest Hemingway and John O’Hara, understandably.

Now, sitting in his office in the old federal courthouse in Boston’s Post Office Square, Higgins was surrounded by transcripts, as all prosecutors are--transcripts of trials, motion hearings, grand jury testimony, interrogations, not to mention the endless stream of police reports. Thousands of pages. Tapes, too, reel-to-reel tapes of FBI and state-police wiretaps. He would say later, “I listened to so many wiretaps and I read so many transcripts of wiretaps that quite unintentionally I became aware of the patterns of elision and compression that people use.”

What Higgins heard in those transcripts and tapes was an authentically new voice in crime fiction. Or, more accurately, an old voice that had never been captured. It was the real, everyday speech of ordinary cops and criminals. It sounded nothing like the scripted lines you heard in crime operas such as The Godfather or slick thrillers like The Day of the Jackal, which then dominated the bestseller lists. Nor did it sound like the stylized patter of hard-boiled pulps, where knock-around guys like Mike Hammer were oddly well-spoken. What Higgins heard were the louts and knuckleheads of Boston’s crime world running off at the mouth. They broke off conversations mid-sentence or looped around in crazy tangents. They mumbled, stumbled, spoke in code, mangled common phrases; sometimes they made no sense at all.

I think Higgins must have known: here was the voice for
his novels, finally.

He managed to capture it in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. “I bought some stuff from a man that I had his name.” “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody.” “You can give me a whole ration of shit and this and that, and blah, blah, blah. But you, you’re still a kid and you’re going out and coming around and saying: ‘Well, I’m a man, and you can take what I say and it’ll happen. I go through.’” That dialogue--the carefully crafted naturalism, the artful authenticity--is the breakthrough achievement of Eddie Coyle.

It is hard now, almost 40 years later, to appreciate how revelatory Higgins’ writing was back in 1972. In an ecstatic review in The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote, “One feels as if one were reading a transcript of a Grand Jury hearing or listening to a tape in a planted recorder.”

Elmore Leonard, in his introduction to the Holt paperback edition, recalls reading Eddie Coyle when it first came out. “I finished the book in one sitting and felt as if I’d been set free. So this was how you do it. … To me it was a revelation.” Leonard has called it “the best crime novel ever written.”

Eddie Coyle was a revelation to me, as well. I was a young assistant D.A. when I first read it, another Boston College Law grad with literary aspirations. I worked in Cambridge then, across the river from Higgins’ old office. I had never read the book. I was only 8 when it came out, and later I was never much of a crime-novel fan anyway. But when I hit the first page, I had the same reaction Leonard did: so this is how you do it.

The plot is simple. Eddie Coyle is a small-time hustler. He is not especially good at his work. On his left hand he has an extra set of knuckles: one of his screw-ups sent a man to prison, and Coyle’s fingers were smashed in a drawer as punishment. (“Ever hear bones breaking? Just like a man snapping a shingle. Hurts like a bastard.”) He is 45 years old. His wife nags him. His kids get picked on at school because their father is a crook. “I’m getting old,” Coyle says. “I spent my whole life sitting around in one crummy joint after another with a bunch of punks like you, drinking coffee, eating hash, and watching other people take off for Florida while I got to sweat how the hell I’m going to pay the plumber next week.”

Coyle is facing a federal sentence for driving a truckload of stolen booze. Desperate to make a little money for his family before he goes in, Coyle makes one last score. He buys guns from a dealer named Jackie Brown and then resells them to a gang that has been robbing banks in the Boston suburbs. But Coyle still hopes to avoid prison, so he takes a chance and rats out Jackie Brown to the feds, expecting they will put in a good word with the sentencing judge. Ultimately both Jackie Brown and the bank robbers are picked up, and they all suspect Coyle is the rat.

But that cornered-man story is the least interesting thing about The Friends of Eddie Coyle. What makes it live is the way Higgins hands the book over to his characters. He lets them talk. And talk and talk. They rattle on about women and Bobby Orr and Hare Krishnas. The book clocks in at a scant 183 pages, yet there is still time for two cops to discuss the proper way to make a cheese sandwich (add mayonnaise) and for two gunrunners to chat about the fart-inducing properties of fried eggs. As much as possible, Higgins allows his characters to narrate the plot, too. They relate their own back stories to one another. Even action scenes are described in dialogue: Higgins will skip a critical event, then immediately cut to a conversation where a character describes what happened.

When Higgins is forced to step on stage as narrator, his prose is stripped. The sentences are terse, descriptive, and short, as if the author cannot wait to slip out of sight and get his characters talking again. He does not digress and he never comments on his characters’ behavior. There is not a theme, a lesson, or an idea anywhere in sight. With one exception--a truly awful passage in which Higgins intrudes to relate a character’s interior thoughts, a gauzy memory of seeing a rattlesnake on a lake shore--Higgins never calls attention to his writing. Nor is he interested in suspense or violence. What little bloodshed there is in the novel is described almost in passing--no gore, no sensationalism. (“The first shot went in nicely.”)

The reason for all of this rigorous economy is that Higgins is not interested in the mechanics of advancing the plot, really. He is interested in the characters and the world they inhabit. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a novel of manners. Eddie Coyle, Jackie Brown, and the other Boston hoods are bound by codes of conduct as rigid as anything in Jane Austen. They must act with tact and strategy to get what they want, just as the Bennett sisters did.

I don’t know if The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the best crime novel ever written, as Elmore Leonard believes. It is the best I’ve read, certainly, and the best novel of any kind about Boston. Lots of novels that came after were influenced by it, Leonard’s own novels among them. But not a single novel that came before The Friends of Eddie Coyle sounds remotely like it. That is a pretty good definition
of a masterpiece.

READ MORE: “Best Boston Movie Ever: The Friends of
Eddie Coyle,” by William Landay.