Channeling The Ghost Of  James “Whitey” Bulger- George V. Higgins’ At The End Of Day  

Book Review 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

At End Of Day, George V. Higgins, 2000

This George V. Higgins crime novel from 2000, At End Of Day, has to be pure fiction, right. The FBI, the G-men, a couple of guys in the guys in the Boston office anyway, trying to put a rope around the guys who talk in low whispers, nods and bullets, the Italian Mafia, the “our thing” guy enlist the aid of a couple of leg-breakers, hit men, independent contractors, loan sharks whatever needs to be done, illegally done a specialty. One guy an Irishman, Arthur, maybe from Southie, a guy, doing not uncommon work over in those precincts and the other guy a not “our thing” Italian guy, Nick, maybe from the North End also doing not uncommon work over in those precincts are feeding information to “Uncle, ” feeding it at the dinner table in one the agents' houses, with the understanding that their own operations, short of murder of course will get a pass. No way this could be the real FBI, certainly not Efram Zimbalist, Jr.’s FBI, not J. Edgar’s. Why it would be a scandal all over the daily prints. Right. So George V. Higgins, ex-prosecutor around Boston is just blowing smoke here. Just letting his imagination run wild having Arthur blow town after a hit, whereabouts unknown, maybe unknowable, and Nick caught in a State Police operation where the G-men, Sloat and Farrier, were clueless worrying, tight stomach worrying about taking out a "loan" from Nick to cover Sloat's mortgage. Pure fantasy unless you have been  reading the newspapers around Boston over the past several years.                  

A lot of times when an author “speaks” to me I tend to go on a rampage going through the litany of whatever he or she has written. That is the case of late with the late Boston novelist and professor George V. Higgins whose work is a special case (like Dennis Lehane of late) since most of the locales and most of the types who populate his novels are very familiar, maybe too familiar to me almost from childhood. Too familiar from the robber baron corner boys turned gangsters who preyed on the edges of our working class neighborhoods to the “on the make” politicos mapping out their career paths from about their eighth year (in full disclosure I went some distance on that route until I realized that I had to try to live with myself most days and would have not been able to say that on most days on that path) to renegade priests trying to conceal their lusts under the collar to the copper who made life easy for the previously mentioned brethren. We were all mixed together down there at the dangerous base society, the grim place when the working poor hung with their outsized hungers and it is only happenstance that one goes one way and the other another. Here is the way I put it in previous review of a Higgins crime novel:  

“Hey, any friend of Eddie Coyle’s is a friend of mine. You know Eddie, right, the Cambridge-bred corner boy who got tied up with some guys who did some things, a little of this and that late at night, a little of this and that about giving guys the means to go rooty-toot-tooton their appointed chores, did some things that “Uncle” might take umbrage at and try to put a guy away for, for a nickel or a dime, maybe. And poor middle-aged sag Eddie did not want to do the time, no way, but also got caught up in something too big for him to handle. So you know Eddie Coyle, the guy who was found not looking too pretty one cop car morning in the back of a stolen Chevy in some back parking lot in some dead-drop bowling alley off Dorchester Avenue in Boston.

Actually now that I think about the matter I don’t know, never heard of, could not say word one about some guy, what was his name again, oh yeah, Eddie Coyle. And of course while a lot of ex-corner boys (Jack Slack’s bowling alleys in North Adamsville for me) knew plenty of guys exactly like benighted Eddie no one could actually know him since he was the fictional creation of the author under review, George V. Higgins, in his first and most famous crime novel, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle published in 1972 (and later adapted for the cinema starring Robert Mitchum as the stand-up guy of the title). But, see, Brother Higgins was a prolific writer and although many of his best works and pieces of righteous ear for “street” dialogue involved low-end, well, gangster types he wrote other crime-centered books where the “bad guys” were not front and center, did not in the final push get away with murder. Although in the book under review, The Mandeville Talent, it was a close thing, a very close thing.”      

In At End Of Day rates with old Eddie Coyle's saga since Higgins has got an ear for that local gangster talk, their ways of operation in the world, and their oversized dreams. And a big deflate on the local G-men.