George V. Higgins

George V. Higgins was an American author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, raconteur, and college professor whose work grew out of Massachusetts public life and late twentieth-century crime fiction. He was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, on November 13, 1939, grew up in nearby Rockland, and spent much of his life in and around Boston. He attended Boston College, where he edited the campus literary magazine, Stylus, and graduated in 1961. He later earned an MA from Stanford University in 1965 and a JD from Boston College in 1967.

Before he became widely known as a novelist, Higgins worked in the law and in newspapers. He wrote for the Associated Press, The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald American, and The Wall Street Journal. He also served as a deputy assistant attorney general for the Commonwealth and as an Assistant United States Attorney for Massachusetts. He spent seven years in anti-organized-crime government positions, entered private practice in 1973, and was active there for ten years. His clients included Eldridge Cleaver, though Higgins withdrew from that case after conflict with Cleaver, and G. Gordon Liddy.

Higgins authored more than thirty books, but he is best known for his bestselling crime novels, especially The Friends of Eddie Coyle, published in 1970. The book helped establish the Boston noir genre of gangster tales and was adapted into a 1973 film starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle. Another of his novels, Cogan’s Trade, published in 1974, was later adapted as the 2012 film Killing Them Softly. His fiction also includes The Digger’s Game, Trust, Bomber’s Law, and the connected Jerry Kennedy books, beginning with Kennedy for the Defense in 1980.

What set Higgins apart was his ear for speech. He was noted for realistic dialogue and admired the work of John O’Hara, whom he praised in a preface to a collection of O’Hara’s stories. Higgins argued that accurate dialogue was not a word-for-word transcript, but an imaginative recreation in compressed form. His books often ask readers to infer what matters from what is said, half said, or left unsaid. In 1990, he published On Writing, a blunt book of advice for aspiring writers that included long excerpts from writers he admired, such as William Manchester and Irwin Shaw.

Higgins’s long path to success shaped his view of the work. He once wrote that the success of The Friends of Eddie Coyle was called “overnight” in some quarters, but “that was one hell of a damned long night, lasting seventeen years.” During that time, he had written fourteen earlier novels and eventually destroyed them. He died of a heart attack at age 59, at his home in Milton, Massachusetts, on November 6, 1999. His best pages still carry force because they sound like people talking under pressure, with danger, humor, and sorrow moving through ordinary speech.