Bomber's Law, by George V. Higgins
Worth, Robert
BRILLIANT VENTRILOQUIST BOMBER'S LAW George V. Higgins Henry Holt and Co., Inc. $22.50, 296 pp. Robert Worth '' A 11 fiction is gossip," according to crime novelist George...
...Higgins has always had a devoted following among literary tough-guys like Norman Mailer and David Mamet, and his latest book has provoked a new round of crusty, defensive praise...
...His fiction is too clever, his plots too spare to achieve the bestselling status of other good crime writers like Elmore Leonard and Scott Turow...
...Robert Worth '' A 11 fiction is gossip," according to crime novelist George V. Higgins, "and the best of it is collected by eavesdropping...
...Dell'Appa, who has been assigned to take over the Mossi case, begins to suspect that Brennan has gotten to know his subject a little too well—or rather, that he sympathizes too fully with Mossi...
...The real substance of Bomber's Law lies not in its fairly straightforward plot but in this crossbraid of digression and flashback...
...The fabric becomes startlingly elaborate...
...That is certainly true of Higgins himself, an ex-federal attorney whose thuggish characters talk circles around the plots that would contain them...
...Yet he will not venture far enough from the cops-and-robbers format to get the serious attention he hopes for...
...25 March 1994 tective novels "entertainments") nor disguise it as something akin to High Seriousness, as did Conrad...
...The detective's job—as many literary critics have observed—is like that of the...
...And like his literary mentor John O'Hara, he resents the unspoken subtext of such praise: that he can do nothing else...
...In Bomber's Law, a young detective, Harry Dell'Appa, discovers that his fellow detective and nemesis, Bob Brennan, has become curiously lax in his efforts to nail Short Joey Mossi, an aging Mafia hit man...
...These characters, for all their gruff cynicism, are brilliant ventriloquists...
...Dell' Appa listens fitfully, letting his mind wander in time to other conversations, and moving slowly toward an understanding of what Brennan and Mossi have been up to...
...at one point we watch Dell'Appa recall a conversation with Brennan in which Brennan, speaking (at length) in a voice of another detective, interrupts that narrative with the voice of still another speaker...
...It is also his most sophisticated effort so far...
...Higgins occupies a curiously vertiginous spot on the literary spectrum...
...As the cops sit together in a cold car, waiting for Mossi to appear, Brennan talks on and on, digressing into stories about other criminals and about his own life...
...Unlike his more austere forebears in the genre, Higgins will neither apologize for his work (like Graham Greene, who labeled his de24...
...Ever since his first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, appeared in 1972, Higgins has been praised for his spectacularly vivid dialogue...
...For some readers, weary of too many sprawling postmodern fictions, that kind of dogged fidelity to genre can be a virtue in itself...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 6
