The Friends of Eddie Coyle
By George V. Higgins
Introduction by Elmore Leonard

“Higgins is my favorite. . . . No, he doesn’t learn from me, I learn from him.”  (back cover)

Introduction

In the winter of 1972 my agent at the time, H. N. Swanson in Hollywood, called to ask if I’d read a recently published novel called THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE.  I told him I hadn’t heard of it and he said, “This is your kind of stuff, kiddo, run out and get it before you write another word.”  Swanie was a legend in the movie business having represented F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain.  I did what I was told, bought the book, opened to the first page and read:  “Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.”

I finished the book in one sitting and felt as if I’d been set free.  So this is how you do it.

The reviews were all raves.  Joe McGinnes in THE NEW YORK TIMES said that George Higgins has “given us the most penetrating glimpse yet into what seems the real world of crime – a world of stale beer smells . . . and pale unnourished little men who do what they have to do to get along.”

Walter Clemons in NEWSWEEK said EDDIE COYLE “isn’t a thriller (though it is – stunningly – that) so much as a highly specialized novel of manners.”

The review in THE NEW YORKER nailed it in the opening paragraph by listing these friends of Coyle – the man himself described as “a small fish in the Boston underworld” – the bank robbers Jimmy Scalisi and Artie Valantropo; the gun dealer Jackie Brown; Dillon the bartender, a character to keep your eye on; and a dealing T-man, Dave Foley.  They’re the book.  They reveal themselves not only by what they do, but also by the way they speak, their sounds establishing the attitude or style of the writing.

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To me it was a revelation.

I was already writing in scenes, trying to move my plots with dialogue while keeping the voices relatively flat, understated.  What I learned from George Higgins was to relax, not be so rigid in trying to make the prose sound like writing, to be more aware of rhythms of coarse speech and the use of obscenities.  Most of all, George Higgins showed me how to get into scenes without wasting time, without setting up the scene, where the characters are and what they look like.  In other words, hook the reader right away.  I also realized that criminals can appear to be ordinary people and have some of the same concerns as the rest of us.

George Higgins learned all this on his own.  He majored in English at Boston College, which was my major at the University of Detroit, another Jesuit school.  Higgins went on to Stanford, he said “to learn how to write fiction,” which he found out “can’t be taught, but I didn’t know that then.”  I left school to write Chevrolet ads and also failed to learn anything about writing.  Higgins joined the Associated Press as a rewrite man, a step in the right direction referred to as “like toilet training.”  He returned to Boston College for a law degree, got a jog as an assistant U.S. Attorney and loved it, meeting a parade of characters he would soon be using in his novels.

Still, getting published was tough.  Along the way from Stanford to EDDIE COYLE, Higgins wrote as many as ten books that he either discarded or were rejected by publishers – perhaps for the same reason my first novel with a contemporary setting, THE BIG BOUNCE, was rejected by publishers and film producers eighty-four times in all, editors calling the book a “downer,” void of sympathetic characters – the same ones I’m writing about thirty years later.  Higgin’s agent at the time of EDDIE COYLE read the manuscript, told him it was unsalable and dropped him.  Let this be an inspiration to beginning writers discouraged by one rejection after another.  If you believe you know what you’re doing, you have to give publishers time to catch up and catch on.

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In the beginning, both Higgins and I had to put up with labels applied to our work, critics calling us the second coming of Raymond Chandler.  At the time we first met, at the Harbourfront Reading in Toronto, George and I agreed that neither of us had come out of the Hammett-Chandler school of crime writing.  My take on THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, for example – which I’ve listed a number of times as the best crime novel ever written – makes THE MALTESE FALCON read like Nancy Drew.  Our method in telling stories has always been grounded in authenticity based on background data, the way it is as well as the way such people speak.  We also agreed that it’s best not to think too much about plot and begin to stew over where the story is going.  Instead, rely on the characters to show you the way.

Five years after EDDIE COYLE, a NEW YORK TIMES review of one of my books said that I “often cannot resist a set piece – a lowbrow aria with a crazy kind of scatological poetry of its own – in the Higgins manner.”  And that’s how you learn, by imitating.

Higgins has been called the Balzac of Boston while I’ve been labeled the Dickens of Detroit.  We didn’t discuss it, so I’m not sure what George thought of his alliterative tag.  What I wonder is who I’d be if I lived in Chicago.

George V. Higgins died on November 7, 1999, only days short of his sixtieth birthday.  During the past twenty years or so his name and mine have appeared together in the press – often in the same sentence – some 178 times.  I’m honored.

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Rules for Writers (1. Don’t Rely on Rules)
New York Times
Published: July 23, 2001

To the Editor:

It was a bright, sunny day when Nancy Drew fetched her Times from the freshly painted veranda. As she paged through the paper, she paused to read an article on writing by Elmore Leonard (Writers on Writing, July 16). Suddenly, her usually plucky demeanor became sad.

‘’Good heavens!’’ exclaimed Nancy ruefully. ‘’Mr. Leonard abjures all of the techniques that made my books so popular in the 30’s and 40’s.’’

HENRY B. MALONEY
Troy, Mich., July 16, 2001

I think he is a MALTESE FALCON fan and didn’t like Mr. Leonard’s comment from the above introduction to EDDIE COYLE.

Elmore’s Five Favorite Books
Gregg Sutter
Posted: 07 July 2007 04:08 PM
Administrator

“All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque. The first book that inspired me to write. I set a play in no man’s land and staged it in my fifth-grade classroom in 1935.

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway. Horses and guns. When I was writing Westerns I’d read a few pages to get in the mood. I still read his short stories.

“High Water” by Richard Bissell. By the time I realized Hemingway didn’t have a sense of humor, Bissell came along to help me develop a natural style.

“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” by George V. Higgins. The best crime novel ever written. I read it and learned how to do bad guys.

“Legends of the Fall” by Jim Harrison. This is pure storytelling, a novella in 25,000 words or less, with only one line of dialogue. And the book glows with life.