What We’re Reading

Fiction Editor Michael Griffith: What I’m reading now? I realize I’m late to the party—Elmore Leonard calls it “the best crime novel ever written” and says it “makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew,” and my fortieth-anniversary edition features an introduction by Dennis Lehane, who tabs it “the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years”—but this week I’ve read for the first time, and with steadily mounting amazement, George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle. A tale told almost exclusively in dialogue, and content to have the plot emerge from and be subordinate to the conversation, it seems an obvious precursor both of The Wire and of everything that’s most interesting in Quentin Tarantino movies. If the sentence “Jesus, I forgot how bad a thing a cheese sandwich is to eat” thrills you as much as it does me—and thrills you far more than a car chase would—this is the crime book for you.