Friends of George V. Higgins

The current Brad Pitt film, "Killing Me Softly", a title that makes it sound like a Roberta Flack musical, is based on "Cogan's Trade," a 1974 novel by one-time Boston district attorney George V. Higgins.

Anthony Lane, probably the best writer on film we have at this time, asks, in The New Yorker, "Why aren't more movies stolen from George V. Higgins?" and goes on to praise Higgins's ear for speech as she is spoke in the down and dirty sections of society.

Only one other of Higgins's novels has been filmed. That would be "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," still a good film, still a terrific book.

The opening scene of "Cogan's Trade":  "Amato in a gray suit with a muted red stripe, textured pink shirt with his initials on the left French cuff, a maroon and gold tie, sat at the kidney-shaped, walnut veneer desk and stared.  'I got to give to to you," he said, "you're a great-looking couple of guys. Come in here about four hours late, you look like..."  Well, you get the idea.

Or how about the fast takeoff in the opening of "The Friends of Eddie Coyle": "Jackie Brown, at twenty-six with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns." Zero to sixty in twelve words, best quick-start since James M. Cain.

Dennis Lehane, author of "Mystic River" and "Gone, Baby, Gone," said Higgins's "Eddie Coyle" was the best novel ever written about Boston. Higgins died in 1999, but he left a lot of work deserving our attention (including, in nonfiction, "The Friends of Richard Nixon," which has a wonderful cover by Edward Sorel, depicting Nixon and his Watergate gang--Mitchell, Haldeman, Erlichman, et al.--holed up and shooting at the cops like 1930s movie gangsters).

Of "Eddie Coyle," Norman Mailer said, "What I can't get over is that so good a novel was written by the fuzz."