AMERICA AT LARGE:George V Higgins' masterpiece of criminal noire was the first – and best – of his 25 novels, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

IT IS IN no sense a “sports book” (although George Higgins would eventually write one of those, too), but its pivotal scene takes place in the midst of a NHL game, a 3-2 Boston Bruins win that the frustrated sportswriter who was its author could not restrain himself from describing in lively detail, right down to a recitation of assists and penalty minutes.

There in his second-tier seat at the old Boston Garden, in a memorable soliloquy that would be faithfully reproduced in Peter Yates’ 1973 Hollywood adaptation of Higgins’ masterpiece of criminal noire, the beer-soaked eponymous central character gazes out at the ice and says of the greatest hockey player either Eddie Coyle or I ever saw: “Beautiful. Beautiful. Can you imagine being that kid? What is he, about 21? He’s the best hockey player in the world. Christ, number four, Bobby Orr. What a future he’s got.”

The observation is laced with irony, because Eddie Coyle has no future: within an hour he will be dead. But then the novel’s title – The Friends of Eddie Coyle – is also ironic, because, as Dennis Lehane points out in his introduction to the new Picador edition commemorating the 40th anniversary of its publication, “Eddie Coyle has no friends. He barely has acquaintances.”

When what Lehane describes as “the game-changing crime novel of the last 50 years” was published in 1970, it was lauded by everyone from Norman Mailer to Ross McDonald. New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt compared it to Hemingway’s The Killers, while to Elmore Leonard it was, simply, “the best crime novel ever written”.

It was devoid of heroes, or even vaguely sympathetic characters, and its strength lay in its unerring rendition of the small-time hoods and petty criminals populating the fringes of Boston’s netherworld – and of the small-time cops and petty prosecutors whose speech patterns and moral codes didn’t seem far removed.

Although it was a milieu that might superficially have appeared alien to the privileged one inhabited by George V Higgins (who had followed postgraduate studies at Stanford by returning to his alma mater, Boston College, where he got his law degree), it was one he knew well. Until his breakthrough with Eddie he had supported his writing habit by working as an assistant US attorney for Massachusetts, specialising in organised crime.

“We always knew,” a classmate from his undergraduate days at BC once recalled, “that George would become either a prosecutor or a proctologist.”

In his capacity with the Justice Department, Higgins was more aware than most of the shockingly cosy alliance linking the Boston constabulary, the feds, the city’s bottom-feeding Irish-American criminal gangs (of whom Eddie Coyle represents a subspecies), and, occasionally, the IRA, that had devolved into a murderous, self-sustaining culture of violence by the time it began to unravel with its public exposure two decades later.

In fact, when the cast began to descend on Boston in the early 1970s in preparation for the film version of Eddie Coyle, Robert Mitchum, who would play Eddie, cultivated, presumably in the interest of verisimilitude, the friendship of the notorious gangster James (Whitey) Bulger. At the time Bulger’s public image was that of an eccentric but essentially harmless South Boston version of Robin Hood, but Higgins, aware of exactly how ruthlessly dangerous Whitey could be, tried to convey his apprehension to the actor.

Mitchum, who had in 1949 served time in California – an experience he likened to “Palm Springs without the riff-raff” – on a marijuana possession charge, reminded Higgins it was Bulger who was imperilling himself, by associating with a known criminal.

Higgins had been writing since the age of 14, and had collected an impressive stack of rejection slips for his trouble. He was 31 by the time he hit paydirt with his first novel, and was amused that “the success of The Friends of Eddie Coyle was termed ‘overnight’ in some quarters; that was one hell of a long night, lasting 17 years”.

While he maintained a private law practice for several years (in which he defended clients as diverse as Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to Watergate burglar G Gordon Liddy), he was primarily a writer for the rest of his life, churning out 24 more novels, two short story collections, and four nonfiction books (including The Friends of Richard Nixon, an analysis of Watergate flawed by its sympathetic depiction of the nut-case Liddy, and an underappreciated baseball memoir, The Passage of Seasons), and writing a newspaper column for much of that time.

Having re-read the new Picador edition this week (at 182 pages, it doesn’t take long), it occurred to me as I glanced at the Higgins titles on my bookshelf that, while some are pretty good, not one of his subsequent novels approached the simple perfection of The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

One explanation seemed obvious: after putting years into fine-tuning Eddie, the man wrote 32 books in the next 20 years, and publishers rushed them into print as fast as he could turn them out.

When I mentioned that to Carlo Rotella, the Boston College culture critic who wrote an appreciation of Eddie Coyle for the Globe a few days ago, he pointed out that along the way Higgins had also switched publishers and editors, encouraging a gradual descent “into unrelieved mediocrity”.

Lehane interrupts his love letter to Eddie Coyle in the new edition to offer yet another view: “No one, before or since, has ever written dialogue this scabrous, this hysterically funny, this pungently authentic.” And he goes on to note that Higgins “spent the rest of his career trying to fix what wasn’t broken, attempting to refine his dialogue in subsequent novels to such a degree of phonetic miscalculation that it became a near-parody of the mastery on display here.”

When I signed on as a columnist for the Herald in 1980, Higgins had already decamped from that paper for the Globe, where he had recently taken over “The Lit’ry Life” column originated by the paper’s elegant iconoclast George Frazier.

Frazier had died in 1974, and while in the intervening years others had with varying degrees of success attempted to maintain the tradition, Higgins and “The Lit’ry Life” turned out to be a perfect match.

We were both new to our jobs, and since George was interested in sports and I in books and politics, we talked, sometimes over a drink, but more often on the telephone, several times a month back then.

Higgins died of a heart attack in 1999, a week shy of his 60th birthday. A precursor of that untimely end had come a few years earlier when he collapsed in the Back Bay and woke up to find himself on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, snarled in rush-hour traffic. As he gradually regained consciousness and took note of his surroundings, he asked the accompanying EMT, “How much do these things cost, anyway?” The medic cited what seemed an obscene hourly rate.

“In that case,” George V Higgins calmly replied, albeit through gritted teeth, “turn the f***ing siren on!”