Gourmet Crookery

By Martha Duffy

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE

by GEORGE V. HIGGINS 183 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

This spare first novel is the sleeper of the current publishing season. A sophisticated thriller, it tracks the downfall of a marginal crook--a Boston gunrunner named Eddie Coyle. The author comes from Boston's South Shore and is a 31-year-old assistant federal attorney for Massachusetts. He knows intimately the riffraff at the edge of organized crime--the pacts and betrayals, the phone calls in bars, the meetings in cafeterias and shopping centers. By using the procedures of surveillance, he is able to achieve a dumbfoundingly authentic atmosphere. Readers feel at once that they have slipped unaware into new and dangerous territory.

Until the third chapter Coyle is referred to only as "the stocky man," in much the same way that a surveillance report would characterize a short man who is carrying too much weight. Eddie is on a desperate course. He has a lucrative deal supplying factory-fresh 38s to a bank robber named Jimmy Scalisi, but he is also up for sentencing for a truck hijacking. "I can't afford to do no more time." he tells a friendly federal prosecutor. "The kids're growing up and they go to school and the other kids make fun of them." Eddie's only hope is to trade recklessly on information and betray his "friends," who, as it happens, are preparing to finger him.

Almost the whole book is dialogue, and it is truly a bravura performance. Higgins is a master of the colorful street language heard around Boston. Throughout the novel, without quaintness or self-parody, he is able to sustain long arias of criminal shoptalk. The reason is that he never merely transcribes. Like Salinger and Raymond Chandler, his ear is really for mental processes. All Eddie's friends use the same idiom, but it is always easy to know which one is talking.

"I don't like an automatic," says Scalisi. "I had one once and I pulled it out and pointed it at the guy and good thing for me he backed down. If he'd've come at me I would've stood there dry-snapping it at him. You just don't have time to crank one in when you need a piece, is all." Higgins may do for "is all" what Salinger's Holden Caulfield did for "and all" in The Catcher in the Rye. Still another Boston locution is the proliferation of the word "there," uttered as often and as meaninglessly as "well" elsewhere in the U.S. To wit: "When he was in Billerica the last time there," or, "So this broad hollers at me there." It would gladden the heart of Gertrude Stein there.

It may be relevant that when George Higgins was in Boston College, he wrote a term paper on "Poker Terms of the South Shore." He has always been listening, it seems, but for such a talented listener he is a very ebullient young man.

He loved Boston College, where he majored in English after a brief fling at premed. "Back in 1961, B.C. was a neighborly place. The students, faculty and deans could get together of an evening and have a few beers and sing whatever Behan sang on educational TV the night before. You could quarrel and maintain mutual respect." After such intimacy, a year at Stanford came as a shock. "You couldn't see professors without an appointment. There were awful boozy confrontations between professors and graduate students. I went there to learn how to write fiction--which can't be taught, but I didn't know that then. Anyway I bled out--bleeding ulcers."

Higgins came home to Hingham, Mass., where he had grown up as the son of a high school teacher. A stint as an A.P. rewrite man gave him formidable fluency: "Rewrite is like toilet training," he says. "It's not hard, and once you learn it you never forget it." A shift to Springfield, Mass., meant that he had to cover the state courthouse. After sitting through about 150 trials, Higgins decided that trial lawyers were having more fun than he was, and he went back to B.C. for a law degree. He has been a public prosecutor for three years, and he loves his work. "I'm like Henry Cabot Lodge, working for the job, not the money," he says. "It's just great if you have some smoked Virgin ia in you. I like to try cases and I have the benefit of righteousness."

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is Hig gins' eleventh novel. He junked the other ten. He does not begrudge the time or the rejection slips. Higgins has never had to milk out the words. Four typewriters fell before the onslaught of prose. So has an agent, whom Higgins gallantly does not name, who dropped him because she thought Ed die Coyle was unsalable. "Nothing will ever come up to the first belt when I got that letter from Knopf!"

Higgins cheerfully admits to logorrhea and predicts a book a year while continuing to work full time as a fed eral attorney. He is cool and confident and willing to give anything a try. Dillon, the hit man who is the best char acter in Eddie Coyle, was the first shad ow to cross the author's brain. "And I said to myself, what's it cost me to foul up some paper?"

. Martha Duffy

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