The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

When jail time is already looming above your head after getting arrested for driving a truck load of hijacked booze, a normal person would restrain from trading even the bogus Nike, let alone the guns. But Eddie is not normal, neither are any of his friends.

I came across Eddie Coyle in a website, where in it claimed the loftiest spot under the heading Don Winslow’s top five crime novel’s. Being a huge fan of Don Winslow, I put aside every other book in my pipeline, and started reading it. Now I see the source of Don Winslow’s inspiration for his writing, especially his book Savages.  Both are path breaking books, in their own right.  

Eddie Coyle is an illicit fixer, who buys and supply guns to his buddies who are intended to do more than just use it for target practice.  Robbing bank is one of them. That puts Eddie in centre of the whole tale as it unravels.  

You may be too intimate to your friend to be hitting on his sister or swapping his underpants, but with the kind of shady deals being carried out between these friends, there will always be a danger of someone ratting someone, sometime or the other. Especially when you are in a fix as Eddie Coyle is in. Yeah, Eddie likes his friends, but he likes his freedom more, so he decides to rat out his gun dealer to his another friend, a sleazy detective cop named Dave Foley in exchange for his freedom.  But Eddie should have known better than to trust the cop. And it’s high time that he realized that all the while he had no friends at all, and after this, there won’t be any.

With eighty percent of the book steered forward with just the witty, authentic dialogues George V Higgins sets a very high bar for any crime writer to out do it.  It deserves all the praise it garnered over the years and three pages into it you will know the reason why it’s deemed as a major influence on every present day Crime writers. Having said that it’s not an easy book to read, being a multiple narrative; your brain needs to be into it, to determine who saying to whom.  

Of the lot, for reason unknown, the below scene is parked on top of my mind.

Eddie Coyle replaced the handset in the receiver carefully. He opened the door of the booth and found a stout woman, about fifty, staring at him. “It took you long enough,” she said.

“I was calling my poor sick mother,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, her face immediately relaxing into an expression of sympathy. “I’m sorry. Has she been ill long?”

Eddie Coyle smiled. “Fuck you, lady,” he said, “ and the horse you rode in on.”

It’s a crime writing master piece, and any serious fan of crime writing should read it and as Dennis Lehane puts in his beautiful written introduction at the start of the book, raise the glass to Eddie Coyle. I would say raise the goddamn bottle to George V Higgins.