The Friends of Eddie Coyle

By: George V. Higgins

Narrated by: Mark Hammer

When small-time gunrunner Eddie Coyle is convicted on a felony, he's looking at three years in the pen - that is, unless he sells out one of his big-fish clients to the DA. But which of the many hoods, gunmen and executioners he calls his friends should he send up river? Set on the mean streets of Boston and told almost entirely in crackling dialogue by a vivid cast of cops and lowlifes, The Friends of Eddie Coyle set a standard for authentically gritty crime fiction that has never been bettered.

Read by Mark Hammer. Narrator Mark Hammer came to Audiogooks with a long and distinguished career in the theater. He was a drama professor at Catholic University and a beloved acting coach at New York's Stella Adler Studio. He has appeared in major regional theaters and Broadway productions as well as on television and radio. Listeners and audio critics agree that the characters and regional dialects they hear in Mark Hammer's narrations are astounding. AudioFile touts this narrator as "one of the finest interpreters of our day."

(p) 2012 Recorded Books©1970 George V. Higgins

Critic reviews

The best crime novel ever written (Elmore Leonard)

A portrait of life on the street as realistic as any ever written (Dennis Lehane)

Higgins deserves to stand in the company of Chandler and Hammett as one of the true innovators in crime fiction (Scott Turow)

Higgins writes about the world of crime with an authenticity that is unmatched

If you haven't read George V. Higgins you can't call yourself a fan of crime fiction (Val McDermid)

No one ever did it better

A Giant of a Writer

Superb. Only a genius like George V. Higgins could pull this off, using only dialog to build a world that has a reality more believable than any narrator could achieve.

The Best Boston Gangster novel that I have read

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, published in 1970, is the debut novel of George V. Higgins, then an Assistant United States Attorney in Boston. The book is a realistic depiction of the Irish-American underworld in Boston. Its central character is the title character, Eddie Coyle, a small-time criminal and informant. I love how the book depicts the criminal underworld in Boston, and it's also been adapted into a film starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle, directed by Peter Yates. But the Novel was too short.