This article is more than 24 years oldObituaryGeorge V Higgins
This article is more than 24 years oldRevolutionary crime novelist who told it like it isGeorge V Higgins, who has died aged 59, was one of the key figures in contemporary American crime fiction. Without him, there would have been no Elmore Leonard, no Tarantino and no avalanche of movies in which killers stand around talking about hamburgers.
Higgins was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, the only child of an Irish-American family. In 1961, he went to Stanford University, California, but left midway through his course and volunteered for the US marines. At the last minute, however, a bleeding ulcer rendered him unfit for military service, and he returned to Massachusetts, where he worked for a while for the Associated Press.
Covering mafia trials in Providence, Rhode Island, persuaded him that being a trial lawyer was a more entertaining career option. He was accepted to the Massachusetts bar in 1967 and went to work for the US attorney general's office, helping to spearhead Robert Kennedy's war on organised crime. It was during this time that he wrote his first novel, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, which was published in 1972.
With this book Higgins reinvented the crime novel by removing its obvious moral centre. Gone was the policeman or private-eye protagonist, who periodically reassured the reader that order was achievable in a troubled world. Instead, from the opening sentence - "Jackie Brown, at 26, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns" - Higgins plunged the reader into something uncomfortably close to the real world of professional crime, in which men and women - but mostly men - lie, scuffle, rob and cheat, just trying to turn a buck.
It wasn't just the milieu of the novel that was revolutionary; the form was also new. Higgins opted to tell his story largely through dialogue, a stylised version of Boston street-talk so persuasive that many believed his modus operandi was simply to record the criminals he encountered in his line of work.
The novel was an immediate success and was promptly filmed by Peter Yates, with Robert Mitchum in the lead. A notable exception to the golden rule that good books invariably make bad movies, it nevertheless flopped.
Higgins never really received the same level of success or acclaim again; his next two novels, The Digger's Game and Cogan's Trade, fine though they are, essentially repeated the Eddie Coyle format. He then set up in private practice in Washington and followed the Watergate affair, which provided the subject matter for his first venture into non-fiction, The Friends Of Richard Nixon, and the subtext for two of his least interesting books, A City On A Hill and Dreamland.
Back in Boston, however, Higgins returned to what he did best - chronicling lowlife. The novels he wrote around the turn of the 1980s are among the best and most underrated in modern American writing. The Rat On Fire and Kennedy For The Defense are scabrously funny tales, and with A Choice Of Enemies (1984) Higgins pulled off the big political novel he had attempted with A City On A Hill, full of awkward wisdom and well-founded cynicism.
In America, sadly, he was relegated to the ghetto of the crime round-up, where critics would routinely praise his dialogue and move on to the next serial killer epic. As a result, he had a particular fondness for Britain, where he had always been taken seriously.
In person Higgins was every inch the smart, cynical trial lawyer with a fondness for red wine and political gossip. When I met him in the late 1980s he revealed himself to be a warm, funny man, but one with a pervasive sense of injustice and disappointment at the lack of serious attention his work was receiving.
Throughout the 1980s he produced a string of fine novels at a rate of one a year - particularly notable being Imposters (1986) and Trust (1989). He finally gave up the law, ruefully concluding that the popular - but plainly idiotic - notion that he lifted dialogue wholesale from his clients was putting people off hiring him.
Instead he took up lecturing at various colleges around Boston, an activity which led to the production of one of the few really worthwhile guides to creative writing, simply titled On Writing. He also wrote a couple of other non-fiction works on baseball and Boston politics.
In the early 1990s, seeing the success of writers like Elmore Leonard, Higgins finally decided that if he couldn't beat them he might as well join them. With The Mandeville Talent (1993), he explicitly rebranded himself as a crime novelist, developing the cheapskate lawyer Jerry Kennedy as a series character, though with limited success. The cosy yarn Swan Boats At Four dismayed many loyal fans without finding a new audience. His last book, The Agent, took on the world of pro sports and was something of a return to form, but the best of his later novels is Bomber's Law (1993), which harked back to glories of old.
Higgins was married twice, first to Elizabeth Mulkerin, with whom he had a son and a daughter, then to Loretta Lucas Cubberley.
George Vincent Higgins, novelist, born November 13 1939; died November 7 1999
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