Guns and ruses

The Easiest Thing in the World: The Uncollected

Fiction of George V. Higgins

Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli

Carroll & Graf, 308 pp., $26

The cover letter, Ashbel Green remembers, was two pages long and served to introduce the author of the manuscript at hand -- George V. Higgins, 33 years old, Boston College, Stanford, B.C. Law School, newspaper reporter, lawyer, prosecutor in the Massachusetts attorney general's office (organized crime section, criminal division), assistant US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. Not your ordinary novelist's resume.

Green, managing editor of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, had plucked the manuscript from the aptly named slush pile, meaning manuscripts that came over the transom without provenance. The novel had been rejected by Little, Brown, and Higgins had off-loaded his agent, who he believed did not understand his work. Green read the book over the weekend and on a Monday morning handed it to editor in chief Robert Gottlieb with the recommendation that it be published. A few days later, Gottlieb concurred.

A contract was sent to Higgins, who signed it, and publication was scheduled for the autumn of 1971 with a first printing of 6,500 copies. Without much hope of response, Green sent early copies to Norman Mailer and Ross Macdonald. Mailer responded: "What dialogue: Higgins may be 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." And Macdonald declared it "the most powerful and frightening crime novel I have read this year. It will be remembered long after the year is over, as marking the debut of a fine original talent." Armed with this artillery, Knopf postponed publication a few months and upped the first printing to 12,500. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks and was sold to Hollywood (Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle starring).

The book, of course, was "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," and 32 years later Green recalls his excitement on reading the opening paragraph. The voice was utterly original:

"Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns. 'I can get your pieces probably by tomorrow night. I can get you, probably, six pieces. Tomorrow night. In a week or so, maybe ten days, another dozen. I got a guy coming in with at least ten of them but I already talked to another guy about four of them and he's, you know, expecting them. He's got something to do. So, six tomorrow night. Another dozen in a week.' "

When Higgins died, much too young, in 1999 at the age of 59, he had published 26 novels, a very good book on writing, and some miscellaneous journalism. He was a writing machine who typically had one book in the stores, a second in galleys, a third in the bank, and a fourth in composition. "The Easiest Thing in the World" comprises two novellas -- that form that so attracted John O'Hara, Henry James, and Tolstoy -- and 13 short stories, all previously uncollected except for three in a volume published in 1988 in Britain. The reader is struck at once by how much Higgins knew about things -- the newspaper business, real estate law, Boston's surroundings, the tradecraft of criminals, the look of loose women, the manners of mean men, denial as a way of getting through the day, automobiles, fishing, gambling, and much, much else -- the loose change of life, and not only loose change.

In his introduction, Robert B. Parker makes the shrewd observation that Higgins was not so much a master of dialogue as a master of monologue. His stories unfold often with the sound of one man talking . . . and talking and talking and talking. His gift for opening paragraphs was prodigious. From "A Principle of Dominant Transience": " 'I'm ashamed of myself,' Donnelly said to Ernie Clark in Clark's office at the Globe, 'man of my age, acting like that.' " From "The Easiest Thing in the World": "Barbara Harkness Kendrick asked me to handle her divorce because, she said, I was a friend of the family. If this had been true, it would have been the worst of all possible reasons. Since it wasn't true, it was merely the worst of available explanations." Along the way, the attentive reader is treated to wonderfully pithy descriptions of covert behavior, such as the menace behind the smile. Detective Lieutenant Inspector Edward South of the Massachusetts State Police conducting an interview: "He was completely at ease in my office, sitting with his left leg crossed over his right to make a desk for his spiral notepad. He asked intelligent questions with the sort of politeness which suggests the possibility of alternative rudeness, should the politeness go unappreciated and the questions go unanswered."

It has to be said that these stories, mostly, concern the world of men. Men at work, men at love, men drinking, men in trouble, men rarely at play. Higgins's world is sarcastic and unforgiving and would be very nearly unbearable except for the ghastly hilarity of it all. In this world, the odds seem eternally six to five against.

Ward Just's most recent novel is "An Unfinished Season."