Higgins is great. He's written what amounts to a dozen scenes with primarily dialogue, and he gets character, plot, action, the whole thing. "Sweating like I did a mile and six furlongs". Higgins has great knowledge of the way things work in the world, first of the legal and other-than-legal business mechanics, and presents these (sometimes extremely complicated) mechanics so well from the level of the characters and where they are, so that it's never expositional but an aspekt of the way the characters walk those avenues. For Ins, the travel agency scam outlined only as part of three very different characters working together -- two criminals and a corrupt businessman front man, who ends up being the toughest of them, in a way -- and the interaction stems from character and only character, so that the intricacies of what the actual business are described as it goes along, almost offhandedly, as if you were going along with them. And the ending is so downbeat, perfectly so, like November low tide at Revere Beach Even with the travesty surrounding the potential filming of "Friends of E. Coyle", Higgins is still mightily underrated. NYer once called him the Balzac of the Boston Underworld, and while this is a nice thing to say that gets at some of Higgins' skills, it is limiting of what he can do...for the other great ability of Higgins is his sketch of the human condition and psychology, his understanding of the business of being human, and the manner and style in which he does it, that is, presented not internally but for the most part just presenting how people talk and the subtleties of their interaction. The long scene of Digger going to ask a favor from his brother is a masterpiece, more Shakespeare than Spillane. For all that Elmore Leonard is vaunted for his underworld dialogue, he's a barney compared to Higgins
A terrific novel by any standard. Everyone remarks on Higgins's dialogue, which is not "realistic" but stylized; these people deliver monologues the way in which characters in musicals burst into song. I assume that the talk of real dirtbags isn't as interesting or funny. For me, the draw of Higgins's novels is the way in which they dramatize the kinds of things that go on in offices and at work all the time: the plot here abut the Greek, Torrey, and Schabb could be replicated (minus the guns and mob junkets) in a thousand offices on Monday morning. This one also has three absolutely terrific set pieces: the Digger's wife giving him a hard time for how he eats and spends money, when the Digger asks his brother (a priest!) for eighteen-thousand dollars, and the one later on in which the Greek gets upset at the new ofice digs. Yes, there's some crime, but very little. This isn't a caper, but a great portrait of an unlikable loudmouth who gets himself in trouble. You'll read it, I don't know. Two, three days. Three days. (That's my weak imitation of Higgins.)
What do You think about The Digger's Game (1973)?
Digger was one of the more interesting Higgins characters I've read about (the others being Eddie Coyle and Cogan.) Now that I'm getting further into reading Higgins, I've noticed certain characters recur in varied degree of focus or importance. Digger is a hard working man, a cautious man, and a caring husband. In the end, the author leaves an open ended question...is he about to be caught and therefore imprisoned (or murdered?) or is he about to get on a plane and be free. I opt for the later. I enjoyed him too much to lock him away. I still have about 20 more Higgins works to go (including non-fiction) and each book only makes me wish he had lived longer to produce more of his wonderful, all hearing dialogues.
—False Millennium
Heroes are in short supply in the novels of George V. Higgins where all characters are craven antagonists. The sneer-talking players in The Digger’s Game scrape for advantage over one another in the grubby 1970s Boston underworld, a scabrous playground where the highest human aspiration is to become a successful mooch. In the business of grown men plotting to obtain something in exchange for nothing—-nothing beyond an exercise of brute force or crude cunning—-a person is occasionally hurt, killed even. But Higgins plays no favorites among his creations, and no character’s untimely and brutal departure would be any sadder than the snuffing of any other habitué of the Digger’s milieu, a fecund and fetid showplace where the winners are defined as born-to-lose skeeves who have cheated circumstances in such a way as to be temporarily unaware of their impending doom. As much as I love finishing Higgins’s books, I’m taking a break from his not-so-wise guys before they discolor my worldview.
—Allan MacDonell
