Tue 18 Apr 2017
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: GEORGE V. HIGGINS – Bomber’s Law.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
GEORGE V. HIGGINS – Bomber’s Law. Henry Holt, hardcover, 1993; trade paperback, 1994.
If you’ve read George Higgins before, you know what to expect. If you haven’t, expect dialogue. Lots of it. 95% of the book. Critics love it and lavish all sorts of superlatives on it, finding his feel for the speech pattern of the denizens of working/lower/criminal class Massachusetts the best ever. Most of them have, anyway.
A state cop has returned from banishment in the hinterlands to take over a long-running surveillance of a bigtime organized crime boss. He’s taking over from an old cop who had made his life miserable as a rookie. He’s got his own problems, career- and marriage-wise. How it all works out is the story.
The problem with using dialogue almost exclusively to define characters an narrate a story is that it’s awfully hard to follow the storyline without reading word for me laborious word. If you like Higgins’ style enough you my not mind, but I did. A lot.
I kept wanting to skip ahead and see what was going to happen; but I was afraid to, because there was no way to tell when the next paragraph would contain something crucial to the story. I think that Higgins’ writing has become self-indulgent and almost a caricature of itself; but if you’ve liked him in the past, try it and see what you think.
April 18th, 2017 at 1:43 pm
Barry’s statement about critics goes right along with what I’ve always thought about Higgins. Literary critics liked his work a whole lot more than mystery fans did, or even the general reading public.
That’s only been a hypothesis on my part. I’m not a big fan of tough and gritty crime and cop stories to begin with, so all I’ve read of Higgins is one short story in a Best of the Year anthology.
And since Higgins’ death in 1999, I think his star has faded. Is his work talked about much any more?
April 18th, 2017 at 8:38 pm
The film Killing Them Softly, based on his novel, Cogan’s Trade, was made five years ago, so he isn’t forgotten. The problem was that Higgins moved from revealing the plot through the dialogue to revealing the plot in the dialogue. I’d put Bomber’s Law as still in the first category, so worth reading.
Why the complaints about dialogue, though? Like jokes and cryptic crossword clues, surely the key to tough-guy crime stories is the way you tell them. It doesn’t apply to all crime novels, but some – especially classic detective stories require people to read them “to follow the storyline … reading word for me laborious word” or they’ll miss the vital clues. Often in Higgins’s best books there is only the clue and the solution is implicit.
April 18th, 2017 at 9:53 pm
All good points, Roger. Barry is no longer with us to defend his review, but I also did not think he stated himself well when he spoke of “reading word for me laborious word,” but at least he did add the “for me.” You are quite right about classical detective novels having to be read very closely, so as not to miss anything.
I spent a few minutes online this afternoon checking out other reviews of this particular book.
I couldn’t access Kirkus, but regarding the dialogue, Publisher’s Weekly tended negative, while the NY Times was half and half.
On Goodreads, though, there were seven reader reviews, of which five were very negative, one in between, the other negative but said the dialogue worked fine listening to an audio version. I should think so!
April 18th, 2017 at 10:21 pm
Higgins wore thin for me about five books in. His dialogue was good, but it got tiresome, and I agree he was more popular with genre critics than readers after those first big books.
While it is second guessing Barry, I think what he probably meant is that after a point you lose some of the pleasure of reading when you are afraid you’ll miss a vital plot point that won’t be picked up or explained later.
April 19th, 2017 at 6:03 am
I was a bit imprecise too when I said “The problem was that Higgins moved from revealing the plot through the dialogue to revealing the plot in the dialogue.” In his early novels we inferred what the characters were like and what they were doing from what they said: later the characters told us what they were doing in what they said, which removed the challenge and made the books unconvincing.
In fact, Steve was very close to the point when he said “Literary critics liked his work a whole lot more than mystery fans did, or even the general reading public.” William Gaddis’s novel JR takes the Higgins technique to its ultimate – 99% dialogue with unidentified speakers in a continuous narrative. Like early Higgins, it’s also very funny. In fact that is one problem with Higgins’s later books; he lost the grim sense of humour of the early ones.