The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Though Higgins would write more than two dozen novels, his first -- published in 1972 and made into a movie with Robert Mitchum the following year -- remains his most famous. Eddie Coyle is a fairly small-time hood who moves guns for people in the Boston area. Big man Jimmy Scalisi has a standing order for hardware to pull a series of bank jobs, dealer Jackie Brown feeds the guns to Eddie, police officer Foley keeps trying to get Eddie to give up Scalisi... Trust
In between other scams, washed-up former college athlete Earl Beale is cooking up a blackmail scheme with his prostitute girlfriend, but things don't turn out quite like he had hoped. Earl starts with a job he has to do because he owes a politician a favor, and the politician owes someone else, so he sends Earl. All he has to do is steal a blue Mercedes that's been used by a judge cheating on his wife at a cheap hotel and get rid of it.
Instead, Earl ...
