The Friends of Eddie Coyle

"Weighed and calibrated like the barrel of a pistol. The fact that he's writing about crooks is crucial in some ways, incidental in others. The real subjects here are life's futility and its bleak humor . . . Elmore Leonard learned from this novel, likewise David Mamet and of course Quentin Tarantino, who saw the narrative virtue in marrying violence to comedies of manners . . . Higgins took the tough-guy novel into areas of demented anthropology and re-created a genre."—Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times

"One of the best of its genre I have read since Hemingway's The Killers."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"Chilling . . . The most penetrating glimpse yet into what seems the real world of crime . . . Positively reeking with authenticity."—The New York Times Book Review

"Rings true as a police siren."—The Boston Globe

"Simultaneously a brilliant thriller and a cold and convincing business prospectus of felony—a profession that traps both sides, gunmen and policemen, into ceaseless compulsory degradations."—The New Yorker

"Truly a bravura performance. Higgins is a master of colorful street language heard around Boston. Throughout the novel, without quaintness or self-parody, he is able to sustain long arias of criminal shoptalk . . . A sophisticated thriller."—Time

"First-rate, absolutely convincing, enormously readable."—The Christian Science Monitor

"Higgins can plot a whole book like one long chase scene. He can write dialogue so authentic it spits. He can catch character like a 'make' in a file of mug shots . . . This cops-and-robbers novel qualifies him for the corner table where all the best tellers of low tales sit."—Life

"The best crime novel ever written—makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew."—Elmore Leonard

"The most powerful and frightening crime novel that I have read this year. It will be remembered long after the year is over, as marking the debut of a fine original talent."—Ross Macdonald

"What dialogue . . . The American writer who is closest to Henry Green. What I can't get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz."—Norman Mailer

"Aspiring novelists of any genre, not just legal suspense, would be wise to read lots of George Higgins."—John Grisham

"A writer of Balzacian appetite . . . the poet of Boston sleaze . . . confident and totally convincing."—Mordecai Richler

"George V. Higgins was an American original and a writer of lasting importance."—Scott Turow

"The first thing to know about George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that it directly entered the crime-fiction canon upon its 1970 publication. The second thing to know is that it holds up as both a writer's-writer thriller and as popular pulp, with Dennis Lehane introducing Picador's new 40th-anniversary reissue of the novel by heralding it as ‘the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years'—a moderate claim compared to that of Elmore Leonard, who hails it as the best crime novel period."—Troy Patterson, SLATE