To Trust Or Not Trust-George V. Higgins’ Trust  

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Trust, George V. Higgins, Henry Holt, New York, 1989    

Recently I have been on a crime novelist George V. Higgins tear as a result of re-reading his classic first and I believe still his best crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (and re-watched as well as a result of that read the film adaptation starring Robert Mitchum as Eddie). As is my wont when I get on a tear on an author I have been picking off his later work although in no particular order. Higgins certainly had an ear, a close ear, for dialogue, especially down in the streets dialogue gained from his growing up working-class town of Brockton where in the old days he would have found plenty of corner boys in the old Irish or Italian streets to perk his interest and from his having been a federal prosecutor where the joint was jumping with them.  

I noted in a review of Sandra Nichols Found Dead that Higgins has tackled all kinds of criminal situations, murder, extortion, leg-breaking, money laundering, you name it in the rough crime categories and has tackled white collar crime, you know, taking bribes, dishing out contracts for a cut, embezzlement, the whole litany of governmental and private company crimes. Along the way there seems to have been three main story lines that Higgins’ work can be grouped around. Stories about the classic street hoods like Eddie Coyle, corrupt government officials like Billy Ryan defended by recurring character criminal defense lawyer Jerry Kennedy, and those amorphous tales like Sandra Nichols Found Dead, involving, for lack of a better term, private citizen crimes, rough or white. I also mentioned in that review that I believe that the prolific Higgins had his best days when he took on the street hoods straight up, brought them to life, and those private crime sagas like Nichols and the book under review, Trust, pale by comparison.

The main story line here is, well, about trust, not implicit trust like one long-time friend might have for another but trust based on mutual understandings, based on a favor to one requiring a favor back. So this whole tale revolves around favors given, taken back, and which ones went awry. The central cause for all of these collisions is one “from hunger” let’s call him a grifter, Earl Beale. A small-time grifter, always scratching for ten here, a hundred there, maybe a thousand max around, unlike a big-time grifter I knew once named Top Hat who pulled a big scam for about a million in cash off a big time gambler and although I have not heard from him for a while I believe that he walked away alive.    

Earl of course had been cutting corners, small corners, ever since he took the fall for shaving points in basketball games that he played in for a New York college in the 1950s. Yeah, he did time as guys like him will when the heat is on and a fall guy is needed but he also made a career thereafter of small hustles whether working at a car dealership, or selling a hot car, or trying to shake down a businessman with telltale photos of him and a steady hooker who also happens to be Earl’s girlfriend. Still he couldn’t pull off that last deal, couldn’t close the biggest deal of his life due to his hubris, or maybe just commitment to the world of small grifts.          

Here is how the favor for favor thing gets played out. One “connected” guy, you know a low-end mobster, did a favor for a friend of Earl’s car-dealer brother, a big unnamed favor, for that friend was a politician, and did not need the heat. In return the politician through his connections in D.C. did the mobster a favor by keeping his gung-ho hot-headed son out of Vietnam in the 1960s when that meant something. That brother’s friend also got Earl’s criminal record erased as a favor to Earl’s brother. But that was not the end of the favor line for the mobster needed a favor for a judge friend (maybe customer is a better word). The favor: getting somebody to “steal” the judge’s car (or rather his wife’s) to avoid a scandal. So the politician calls in Earl’s brother’s debt and the brother calls in Earl. Of course Earl as we now know is the weak link since after he “stole” the car he decided to sell the car through his brother. So the brother sold the car as legit (on Earl’s word and paperwork) until the car turns up on the “hot” sheet and that begins the breakdown of favor-dom.

Now whether all of this back and forth on favors is enough to sustain interest over a couple of hundred pages filled out with plenty of filler is a close question. I say, as I have said before, old Higgins is in his glory with the serious street con artists and here just so-so.