George V. Higgins, a prosecutor and novelist who wrote some 25 books, primarily about crime and the Boston Irish, died aged 59 in Milton, Massachusetts, on November 6th.
When his book The Friends of Eddie Coyle was published in 1972, it became an instant success. The book was made into a film of the same title the following year, directed by Peter Yates and starring Robert Mitchum, and was later chosen as one of the top 20 post-war American novels by the Book Marketing Council.
Along with his next two gritty tales, The Digger's Game (1972) and Cogan's Trade (1974), it established George Higgins as a top mystery writer, adept at mimicking the argot of the Boston underworld and telling his story in authentic, sparse dialogue.
Born in the Boston suburb of Brockton, the only child of two teachers of Irish-American background, he took a bachelor's degree in English from Boston College, a master's in English from Stanford University and then a law degree from Boston College. Admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1967, he worked in organised crime units as a state, and then federal prosecutor, until 1974, when he went into private defence practice. Among his clients were Watergate "plumber" and crime novelist, G. Gordon Liddy and Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver.
In reviewing his second novel, The Digger's Game, the New York Times said: "As a hundred reviews attest, Higgins has a gift for bigcity, nether world smart talk. It is profane and salty but vigorous and imaginative and full of humour . . . Higgins makes the dialogue do everything but climb up a rope. It reveals character, advances the plot, exposes the past and shakes us out of our assumption that the underworld is really anything else than the frontier of the square world."
Among his other books were his 1975 novel City on a Hill; his nonfiction Watergate study The Friends of Richard Nixon. Other fiction works included three featuring protagonist lawyer Jerry Kennedy - Kennedy for the Defense (1980), Penance for Jerry Kennedy (1985) and Defending Billy Ryan (1992).
Although his later novels were less successful than his earliest, he continued to work. His most recent novel, The Agent, was published this year.
The author is survived by his wife, Loretta, and two children by a former marriage, Susan and John.
George Vincent Higgins: born 1939; died November, 1999