I’m not quite sure why it took me so long to discover “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”, but I know for certain that Dennis Lehane was responsible for helping correct my oversight. See, not too many years ago, I’d spent a couple years living and working up in Boston, Massachusetts. New England wasn’t a usual stop for our traveling circus, but since this was an extended engagement, I used the opportunity to immerse myself in the local fiction.
That was a heady time for tales of Boston crime, as the legendary gangster, James Joseph Bulger (better known as “Whitey”) had just been captured after more than a decade on the run. Movies like “The Departed” and “The Town” were killing it at the box office, and as for me, I spent my share of cold winter afternoons in the local library, tearing through stacks of police procedurals. And I recall plowing through the bulk of Dennis Lehane’s published works and spotting a brief afterword, one which contained a short blurb of praise for “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”. Well, if an esteemed writer like Mr. Lehane is going so far as to call this story the best crime novel ever written, you can be sure that it’s going right to the top of my own reading list.
This is the story of Eddie Coyle, an aging gangster employed by an unnamed crime syndicate in Boston. As the book begins, Eddie is awaiting sentencing for his involvement in an earlier truck hijacking, and he’s under a great deal of pressure to become an informant and testify against his co-conspirators. Eddie’s doing his best to decline the Feds’ offer and stay loyal to his “Friends”, even if it means sacrificing his freedom… but as we all know, criminals don’t have friends, only associates. And since everyone in Eddie’s circle knows all about his pending case, when a major crime gets broken up, the mob naturally assumes that Eddie Coyle’s gone and ratted them out!
One of my favorite parts of this book is the way that the author so accurately portrays the sociology of the criminal underworld. Like most writers, Mr. Higgins kept his day job, which in his case was serving as an Assistant US Attorney. A native of nearby Brockton, Mr. Higgins seemed intimately familiar with some of the locations he wrote into this novel. In fact, it’s easy to picture the man sitting quietly in the back booth of some working-class bar along the North Shore, carefully observing his fellow patrons while mentally assigning them character names and backstories.
I normally make a practice of giving away books after I’m done with them, but “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” is one that I’ve hung on to for re-reading. Yes, it’s simply that good… and if you’re any kind of crime fiction fan, then you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.