‘In most novels, it’s easy to spot the good guys and the bad guys. In this novel, the late George V. Higgins refuses to truck in easy morality. Relying on his own experience as an assistant U.S. attorney, Higgins pulls back the veneer on the real criminal underworld, not the romanticized version readers kept in their heads before The Friends of Eddie Coyle was published. There are no noble gangsters swept up in high tragedy in Higgins’s world and no righteous cops obsessed with justice. There are only guys punching a clock, day in and day out; for some the job is to rob, to kidnap, or, in the case of Dillon, to kill. For others, the job is to arrest or prosecute. They’re working stiffs, essentially, and no one gets too hot and bothered about the work unless they think someone ratted them out. Near the end of the book, one character asks another, “Is there any end to this shit? Does anything ever change in this racket?” The other character responds, “Of course it changes… Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes every day.”’ (Denis Lehane in his Introduction to George V. Higgins’ novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The novel was made into a film, directed by Peter Yates, in 1973, starring Robert Mitchum as the eponymous hero/anti-hero).
