The story is simple. Eddie “Fingers” Coyle resells guns to “friends’’ like small-time hood Jackie Brown and bank robbers Jimmy Scalisi and Artie Van. Eddie’s got a wife and kids and a no-show job, all of which barely get mentioned. Convicted for driving a truckload of stolen liquor, he is facing sentencing and certain jail time. The only way out is to sell information about a friend or two to federal agent Dave Foley, a man he knows is not his friend.
We know what’s coming because Eddie is not all that smart. “I bought some stuff from a man that I had his name, and it got traced, and the man I bought it for, he went to MCI Walpole for fifteen to twenty-five. Still in there, but he had some friends. I got an extra set of knuckles. Shut my hand in a drawer. Then one of them stomped the drawer shut. . . . You got no idea how it hurt.’’ Eddie goes on to say that the guys who hurt him were “matter of fact,’’ telling him that “it isn’t anything personal, you understand, but it just had to be done.’’
The novel’s ending is as banal as it is predictable, and that is Higgins’s point. The only question is when Eddie’s friends will do him in. It’s nothing personal — just like Eddie, his buddies would readily betray him if it meant getting out of jail. The criminal justice system with its equally pedestrian DAs and investigators feeds off this desperation.
Higgins was a 32-year-old Stanford graduate who’d written Chevrolet ads, covered crime as a reporter for the Providence Journal, and worked as a prosecutor on organized crime cases in Boston when “Friends” came out. He’d written 14 unpublished novels, and when his agent read “Friends,” he dumped Higgins, saying the manuscript was unsaleable.
In a telephone interview, Lehane said, “What’s so daring about the book is that [Eddie] is just a schlub. There’s nothing romantic in the world of Eddie Coyle. No noble gangster. No Shakespearean themes. Just this grungy world. That’s what Higgins nailed so perfectly.’’
