Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

These are my favourite noir crime books. All of them are brilliant.

Please read them soon…

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V Higgins (1972)

‘Jackie Brown at twenty six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.’

That is such a great start and it gets better as we hang around, ear-wigging on Eddie Coyle the gun dealer and ‘friends’ such as Dillon the hitman, Jimmy Scalisi and Artie Valantropo the bank robbers, and corrupt cop Dave Foley.

The style is flat and dry and lean and the whole thing is done almost entirely in speech, with most chapters a dialogue between two of these ne’erdowells, who are constantly shooting the shit while they’re wheeling, dealing, cheating and stealing. Higgins doesn’t need to describe his characters – just from the way they talk, you feel you can smell them.

There’s a fantastic bank robbery, a couple of vicious murders, and colourful minor characters such as black panthers and hippies with M16s. Of course, as in any good noir, it all goes tits up, but following these guys down is a gripping ride.

Elmore Leonard learned plenty from this book (he called it the best crime novel ever written), and I reckon Tarrantino did too. Read it, and you’ll be glad you don’t have these guys lives but wondering if you could ever sound that cool. An unjustly obscure crime classic.