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Before I learned the characters were named Jimmy Scalisi, Arthur Valentropo, and Eddie Fingers, I knew they belonged to the mafia of the Boston underworld. The first paragraph of The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins offers the voice and tempo for the book. A rough, nasal diction establishes the proper atmosphere for what Stanley Fish has called the “angle of lean”—all the foreshadowing the opening lines can accomplish for a story. “Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.”

People tell me that I write musically, that I pay more attention to the sounds my words make than their coherence. Is that a crime? When I heard that George Higgins, lawyer, journalist, and so-called Balzac of Boston, had the same problem, I had to investigate. Higgins writes “low brow arias of scatological poetry,” and fiction a la genre “noir.” The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the first of thirty novellas in kind. Its bare-boned prose with perfect dialogue rattles shrill in your head weeks after you’ve read it, much like David Simon’s HBO series The Wire. Through scenes made of pitch perfect nasal mafia-tough-guy dialogue, the book proceeds with easy readability and the hypnosis of a crime T.V. show.

The first sentence reeks of dark alleys: “Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.” Read this line aloud to experience how gangster “scatological poetry” is guttural. You have to squeeze your gut to push the word “guns” out. Feels like you’ve been socked. “Jackie Brown at twenty-six” has an eerire singsonginess. “Jackie Brown” and “twenty-six” are two-syllable-one-syllable couplets which pivot around “at” like a fulcrum. Naïve little Jackie Brown on his seesaw is made fun of by a singsong nanny-nanny-poo-poo schoolyard taunt. What is brilliant about this set up is how the first five words depict Jackie Brown’s naïveté in the culture of seasoned criminals in which he seeks initiation. Jackie Brown’s youth and inexperience will be his downfall, and Higgins with the judgment of an old-timer mocks him from the get-go. The next phrase in the opening sentence, “with no expression on his face,” when read aloud, doesn’t require much mouth movement. Or, at least, I had a mind to read it that way to see how Jackie Brown looks and talks. Try the phrase in two chunks: “with no expression,” pause, “on his face.” ‘Face’ hisses. No expression is a cold mug. And with no expression, Jackie Brown’s talking. About guns.

The use of “said” in “said that he could get some guns” is the first of what becomes an over-used word in the book. Higgins’ scenes hang on dialogue and the rhythm of the exchange typically uses “said” like CB radioers use “over and out.”

“I don’t know as I like that,” he said. …

“I understand,” Jackie Brown said. …

“You don’t understand the way I understand,” the stocky man said. “I got certain responsibilities.”

“Look,” Jackie Brown said, “I tell you I understand. Did you get my name or didn’t you?”

“I got your name,” the stocky man said.

“Well all right,” Jackie Brown said.

“All right nothing,” the stocky man said.

The dialogue volleys thus, “said,” “said,” “said,” with each “said” striking its blunt end. Pronounce “said” with a “dh,” as if the consonant “d” has an inherent period, a fist. ‘Dh’ punches. When Higgins’ characters speak to one another, they box each other’s jaws. They are insultingly redundant. After Jackie Brown “said he could get some guns,” he patronizes his buyer, “I can get your pieces probably by tomorrow night. I can get you, probably, six pieces. Tomorrow night.” The dialogue is inefficient in exactly the ways real speech is wasted. The reader can’t help but be transported into deceptively real scenes.

The roughness of Higgins’ cadences, the expressionlessness, and the blunt-ended dialogue capture mafia dialect and issue a murky atmosphere. Dialogue-driven story is an apt choice when depicting criminal characters whose world is clouded by the uncertainty of rumor. Their livelihoods depend on the acuity of their BS and careful scrutiny of the BS of others. Talk is the main game of dealers and thieves. Talk that has its own violence is where the pitch rings perfect. Higgins nails it.

Balzac has a famous line, “Behind every fortune lies a great crime.” It seems Higgins made it his business to turn great crimes into fortune again. In his prolific accounts, criminals’ coffins are his coffers. Higgins sculpts and sells stories of scurrilous scat. He resurrects voices from the shadows of his city, and they haunt us with their dead mans’ tales.