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.”