Back on the Beat

By Paul Gray

THE JUDGMENT OF OEKE HUNTER by GEORGE V. HIGGINS 276 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $8.95.

In The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), Novelist George V. Higgins did for Massachusetts hoodlums what Damon Runyan did for Broadway's guys and dolls: he turned their chatter into brassy poetry. Higgins' next two thrillers dipped into the same shady world as his first--that cramped anteroom just off the criminal stage where bit-players practice their monologues. After a talky Washington novel (A City on the Hill) and a tepid retelling of the Watergate investigation (The Friends of Richard Nixon), Higgins has returned to the beat where he evidently belongs.

This time he focuses on the street-level cops in pursuit of the small-time robbers. Deke Hunter, 31, is a burly plainclothes detective who would much rather be starring for the Red Sox. "Most guys," he explains, "can't hit a major-league curve. Turned out, I was one of them. Also a major-league fastball." Instead of fame and glory, Hunter has a laundry list of problems: a bad marriage and worse pay, a house full of worn-out appliances and a publicity-hound of a D.A. on his back. Worst of all, Hunter is stuck digging up the dirt on an open-and-shut bank robbery case that will not stay closed.

This investigation and the subsequent trial proceed without much suspense but with plenty of grimy authenticity. Higgins, himself a lawyer and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, has a feel for the greasy machinery of justice.

In Deke Hunter's case, the physical evidence he collects is much less important to the outcome than plea bargaining, defense shenanigans, tips and perjured testimony.

Higgins does not tell this story. He shows his characters telling it. to each other. Oddly, they all speak the same puckish periphrasis. Listening to them is like sucking a persimmon. They are also regularly funny. When Hunter's wife complains about the violence in a film they have just seen, he reminds her that "nobody made you go there, you know. Matter of fact, I think I hadda pay the guy about six bucks, I think it was, before he'd let either one of us in." Hunter's sidekick facetiously admits to having no brains: "That's why I decided, I was gonna be a cop. If I was any dumber, I would've been eligible for law school."

This steady torrent of dialogue creates some awkward moments. Conversations must be disassembled like Chinese boxes: " ' "My ex-wife," he said, "said the same thing," ' Locke said." At moments such as these, talk does indeed seem cheap. For all its laconic wit, The Judgment of Deke Hunter still teeters be tween the description of manners and the repetition of mannerisms. The characters are good fun to be around, but they never get more complicated than their last remark.

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