rhetorical readers a great deal of indirect guidance, and here I shall expand
on my analysis in chapter 1 by focusing on two of his main methods, each
associated with a different central character. In the first method, deployed in
the presentation of Eddie Coyle, the authorial and conversational disclosures
combine to reveal an increasingly clear view of the character and his situa-
tion, and rhetorical readers need to relate those disclosures to the developing
progression. In the second method, deployed in the presentation of Eddie’s
so-called friend, the saloon keeper Dillon, the conversational disclosures ini-
tially dominate the authorial disclosures and misdirect Higgins’s audience’s
understanding of the character and his role in the progression. Only gradually
do the authorial disclosures overtake and subsume the initial conversational
disclosures, and when they do, they lead Higgins’s rhetorical readers to some
substantial reconfigurations of the progression. But before I move to detailed
analysis of these two methods, I need to provide two additional contexts: (a)
Higgins’s reputation for composing authentic dialogue and (b) a broader theo-
retical discussion of communication through dialogue.
HIGGINS’S DIALOGUE
Although literary critics have not paid much attention to Eddie Coyle, other
crime novelists hold Higgins’s narrative and its dialogue in high esteem. (A
search with the key words “Higgins” and “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” in the
MLA International Bibliography in February 2017 turns up only four entries,
two by me, one of which is an earlier version of this analysis.)^1 As I mentioned
in chapter 1, Denis Lehane calls Eddie Coyle “the game-changing crime novel
of the last fifty years” (vii), and Elmore Leonard goes so far as to declare it the
“best crime novel ever written,” one that “makes The Maltese Falcon read like
Nancy Drew” (vii). Both Leonard and Lehane also single out Higgins’s dia-
logue as crucial to the novel’s success. Leonard, after noting the “authenticity”
of Higgins’s dialogue, employs the principle that imitation is the highest form
of flattery: “Five years after Eddie Coyle, a New York Times review of one of my
books said that I ‘often cannot resist a set piece—a lowbrow aria with a crazy
kind of scatological poetry of its own—in the Higgins manner.’ And that’s how
you learn, by imitating” (vii). Lehane simply indulges in good old-fashioned
hyperbole:
- William Vesterman offers many astute observations about the style of Higgins’s dia-
logue as well as some insightful observations on the opening chapter. Peter Wolfe’s Havoc in the
Hub offers an intelligent overview of Higgins’s corpus. His chapter on Eddie Coyle is compatible
with my argument, but his focus is primarily thematic. The other essay by me is a companion
piece to this analysis (“Voice, Tone”).
170 • CHAPTER 9