The Rat on Fire

...The sheer periphrastic quality of the dialogue in a Higgins novel, that life-like quality of most everyday speech that renders it so maddeningly dull, ought to doom his books from the start...

...A sort of subterranean situational ethics takes hold for Higgins...

...Of course I can't get no lawyer...

...This incompetence, combined with the mundane circumstances that usually seem to lead to crime, draws us head-on to the central problem I have with all the books, from The Friends of Eddie Coyle to The Rat on Fire...

...Leo has some knowledge in the matter of arson and the novel is on its way...

...I can lay brick, if there's nobody from the union standin' around...

...Whether in his fine newspaper column in the Boston Globe or in the pages of his novels, Higgins impresses with his.competency to distill his corner of the world into an entertaining form...

...What you ought to say," Billy said, "you ought to say, 'Get me somebody else.'" Within the awkward realism of those lines lies the secret of Higgins's success...

...Leo has obviously always hovered around the edges of crime, but Fein suggests as payment for his court costs a simple little torch job on a tenement building that Fein owns where the residents sell for scrap such things as the hot water pipes...

...A look at the Higgins method is instructive...

...Old New Yorker-story hands sigh deeply as they remove the brown postal slip-cover, dreamily flip past the cud-chewings of "Talk of the Town," chuckle once or twice at a Koren or a Hamilton cartoon, and then nestle a bit deeper into the old armchair as they reach what they already know to be another fusty bit of fiction with which to while away 25 or 30 minutes...

...You give me enough furring and wallboard, and let me into your place in the morning, I will have the joint rebuilt before you can get through the traffic that night and there will be no plaster dust lying around all over the place...

...But he does struggle with a form of justice in many of his books and this usually gives a final stabilizing feeling...

...And yet, after finishing a new tale of a mother and her son in some nameless middle European country, or some mock-heroic peek at the dissolution of an affair, or whatever, by God if our old hand doesn't invariably mutter, "Fine writing . . . brilliant editing . . . slice of life,'' and then putter off to tie a fly or re-pot a geranium...

...Within Higgins's world of crime there is always a high degree of bumbling incompetence...

...I dunno how many furnaces and burners I took out and put in...

...Rewire the upstairs, put in an intercom, put a humidifier on the furnace, put in your sump pump-I done all those things...

...Instead, paragraphs such as the following are Higgins's stock in trade: '-'Billy," Leo said, "I'm not a banker...

...It is a highly successful moment for Hig-gins when it clicks to the reader that one set of voices is eavesdropping on the other set as all four men chatter away...

...Order is returned to this society...

...Roofing's something I learned about thirty years ago...

...But Jerry Fein has to do what I say...

...No sweat...

...In every novel Higgins pushes the language of dialogue to its limits...

...Somewhere between a regional writer and a wholly versatile novelist, George Higgins at the moment is at the peak of popular fiction...

...I have absolutely no idea whether small time Roxbury hoods like Leo Proctor and cops on the take like Billy Malatesta speak to each other in this manner...

...I can install your hot-water heater...

...And yet compulsively we read on and, like our friend over at the New Yorker, find ourselves sitting straight up at the end of The Rat on Fire applauding and anticipating the encore...

...George Higgins will never write a comedy of manners...

...All the time...

...A little orange stove that's shaped like an ice-cream cone...

...Custom bookcases and platform beds, bathroom vanities and molded showers, parquet floors and new bay windows: I do all of them things, and I never once had one complaint that was legitimate...

...Leo's fall is postponed for another caper and the cop takes his punishment...

...You want gold-plated faucets that look like swans...

...At the risk of straining a somewhat autobiographical analogy, may I say: Even so with Higgins...

...I can insulate your attic and I can make your cellar stop leaking, sometimes...

...He will also probably never write a book set on a boat nor a book full of historical sweep...

...Higgins manages this almost solely by having his various low-life lawyers, cops, and three-time losers talk to each other...

...But once they started, all of a sudden I needed a lawyer...

...The common reader feels manipulated and Higgins, who has practiced law for many years in and around the environs of such characters and has undoubtedly felt such emotions as well, knows this...

...of Jimmy Breslin and hard-boiled types like Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe to convince the reader that Higgins is not drawing stick figures...

...I can glaze your windows where the vandals broke 'em and I can point your exterior bricks if I have to...

...The second element of this cockeyed ethos underscores this equation: Higgins leads us to believe that the bad guys will always be bad, but when occasionally the cops are bad the simple nature of the criminal act is muddied...

...This is a gimmick, a realistic device to trick us into believing that we are eavesdropping on the whole motley crew of thugs, arsonists, and cops in the novel, and, as a matter of fact, it works...

...It is all too easy to feel sorry for the likes of Eddie Coyle and Leo Proctor...

...Every Higgins fan knows the numbing feeling that sets in upon first opening a new opus and realizing that once again we are to be on the receiving end of nothing but conversational dialogue between low-life hoods or their moral counterparts in law enforcement...

...But there is enough of the aura of Jimmy Cagney and the Queens, N.Y...

...There are two versions present in the latest novel of the sort of ethic that controls this untidy world: When a petty criminal oversteps his competence in an attempt to move up in the world of crime, he is slapped down by circumstance...

...I do live inna real world...

...The trouble is," Leo said, "doing all them things hasn't done me enough good as far's money's concerned, and as a result I am in a lot of trouble with a lot of bankers who don't seem interested in my explanations...

...The world of crime is a simple place in Higgins's books...

...I had enough on my plate as it was...

...I can put those in...

...When Billy Malatesta, the crooked Fire marshal, looks the other way during the arson investigation, Leo Proctor's crime is subsumed into a lesser class...

...Although Higgins probably knows the territory as well, he most certainly knows the literature in the field of crime...

...Not terribly satisfying for us to believe, but we must believe such an expert witness as George Higgins...

...But I can get Fein, and Fein has got the thing there that says he is a lawyer, even though the idea of Jerry Fein in court is something that'd gag a billy goat that had to go to court...

...None to speak of, anyway...

...I didn't need any cops chasing me around...

...Now," he said, "I was satisfied with that, and I don't really see why I thought I hadda go out and get myself in trouble with the cops too...

...I can refit your f.....' waste disposal...

...I'm not a bad carpenter...

...What he will continue to do is constantly to surprise the common reader with his ability to fix in time and place a small section of mankind, the Boston world of the habitual petty criminal...

...When small-time Leo Proctor strikes the deal with Jerry Fein, whereby Proctor will arrange for Fein's rat-infested tenement to go up in flames, the gods that control such matters in Massachusetts begin arranging for the fall of Leo Proctor...

...Very ordinary men, usually not terribly bright, are trapped in a life of fat, demanding wives, suffocating debt brought on by their predatory children, business failures caused by a deceiving world, or, in the case of Leo Proctor in The Rat on Fire, a drunken drive into a pond off of the Massachusetts Turnpike which occasions his need of Fein the lawyer...

...His most outrageous device in The Rat on Fire is a literary trick used strategically through the book in which two separate conversations run simultaneously in the same pages...

...I can put in dishwashers and change your locks and fix your garage-door opener...

...I can do the pipe work...