The Friends of Eddie Coyle

⚖The case for it

Four fifths of this book is people talking, and Higgins almost never steps in to explain a scene or tell you what anyone is thinking. He was a federal prosecutor in Boston and it shows, since the crooks and the cops sound recorded rather than written, and every speaker stays distinct across a sandwich order or a stray remark about nothing. It “reads more like a play than a novel,” “sarcastic, vile, and to the point,” like “the end of the night at a bar.” Nobody here is glamorous and nobody is aiming high. Elmore Leonard learned the trick from this book.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Long stretches of dialogue carry no attribution at all, so you work the speaker out from tone, and readers report getting “totally lost in Higgins word jungle.” You are “dropped straight into the middle of things” with no sense of who anyone is or what is at stake. Everyone talks at the same rate regardless of role, which blurs them rather than separating them, and there is nobody to root for by design. One reader wanted “less word-of-mouth and more thought-of-head,” and a critic singles out the book’s one interior passage as “a truly awful passage.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings