George Higgins was a writer whose prime time ended just a few years too soon for him to be everywhere on the web, with a personal site, publisher sites and fan sites; mostly one finds academic overviews and book sellers with copies of the few novels that remain in print. He passed on in 1999, still writing but for the most part his reputation remains focused on his first three published novels.
The most famous of all is the first, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, due to both stunning quality and a decent film version starring Robert Mitchum. Coming off a few years of practicing criminal law in Boston from the mid-’60s, its arrival in 1972 offered a new view of a crime novel: beyond gritty but delivered almost entirely in realistic dialog complete with a regional accent that jumped off the pages.
The Digger’s Game a year later was more of the same (the third novel in the sequence is Cogan’s Trade); the title itself is a prime example of Higgins’ burned in local style–how many of you aren’t surprised to find out The Digger of the title is a nickname for the main character? Me I’d always expect the title to be just “Digger’s Game” if we’re talking about a person. You go most of the book anyway not really knowing or remembering his given name, just The Digger.
If you’re looking for omniscient authorial overviews, insights or descriptions this isn’t the right book. Almost every paragraph is wrapped in quote marks, no pretty adjectives or adverbs to telegraph the meaning. People talk to each other, sometimes they tell stories or reminisce about previous escapades, in short, harsh sentences. Do this, I did that, why’d you do the other, that’s the basic sentence structure throughout.
So The Digger’s Game is a good read. Different and at just over 200 pages in the edition I have Higgins doesn’t have space to get boring or abstracted. If I had to point out one significant flaw, which doesn’t really bother me, its the two separate stories that are only artifically connected by the event–a trip to Vegas–that sets everything up; otherwise they run in parallel and, to some degree, mirror each other but essentially are two novellas jammed together to make a better marketing proposition.
recommended
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