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Imagining Real Cities: Eddie Coyle’s Motor City Friends
Roman Sympos
I first became interested in Elmore Leonard because I like to read crime fiction and I know Detroit. It wasn’t until I was working as an English professor in Boston, and married with two kids, that a friend told me to read Swag. From the first page, I regretted the delay.
What hooked me almost instantly was Leonard’s sense of place. This was the Detroit I knew: crowded, dirty, parochial, demographically diverse, racially segregated, built up and boarded up, spread out and burned out—not for tourists. Writing about detective fiction more than a century ago, G. K. Chesterton observed, “It is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life.” What Chesterton said of detective fiction applies, I believe, to the broader category of crime fiction today, at least as regards the genre’s sense of place. “A city,” he continued, “is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones” (“A Defence of Detective Stories,” in The Defendant, 1901). A city like Arthur Conan Doyle’s London is poetic, Chesterton implied, because, like Homer’s Iliad, it frames a world defined entirely by the agon of opposing individuals who, as we might say nowadays, act locally to produce chaos globally. This world challenges the reader to make sense of it.
If Leonard’s Detroit were in fact a poem, it might remind us of the work of Charles Bukosvky, but I think it’s even closer to Homer or Virgil than Doyle’s London was—full of senseless violence, male swagger, conniving (and occasionally bellicose) females, dark humor, fickle gods, fortuitous outcomes, and an endless flow of nepenthe (Homer’s word for opium, our heroin), courtesy of an array of international cartels, with ruined factories and empty storefronts taking the place of Ilium’s toppled towers, and Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe mansions standing in for the palaces of Argos or Thebes.
David Geherin, one of the earliest and ablest observers of Leonard’s Detroit settings, has warned against putting too much emphasis on detail in seeking to isolate a gifted crime writer’s sense of place: the best of them, he says, “do more than simply map out street names and familiar landmarks. They evoke such a vivid sense of location that they capture the spirit or soul of that place” (The Scene of the Crime, 5). I would go further: some of the very best writers of crime fiction draw upon the imaginative resources of the ordinary reader, along with what the reader has already heard or read about a given place, to evoke a “vivid sense of location” that captures its “spirit or soul” with barely a reference to the details, let alone the names, of streets or landmarks. This was part of what Leonard learned about crime writing from George V. Higgns’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1972, two years after its initial publication and three years after Leonard published his first crime novel, The Big Bounce, in 1969, following a long and successful career of writing Westerns.
Leonard's biographers consider The Friends of Eddie Coyle the most important single literary influence on his crime fiction, and Leonard himself couldn’t stop praising it (1). According to Geherin, Higgins showed "how effective graphically realistic (and frequently obscene) dialogue could be,” while his use of long subjective monologues "reminded Leonard that describing events from a character's point of view rather than his own could enhance the realism of the work" (44). James Devlin sees The Friends of Eddie Coyle as Leonard's new "enchiridion" (16), his "handbook" for crime-writing, in much the same way that For Whom the Bell Tolls shaped his early Westerns. Devlin even compares Higgins's impact to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Walt Whitman, "who said he had been simmering until Emerson brought him to a boil" (17).
Well, yes and no. While it certainly played a role in the inception and development of Leonard’s quintet of 1970s Detroit novels, beginning with 52 Pickup, The Friends of Eddie Coyle appears to have had little immediate or long-lasting impact on Leonard’s style, per se. Mr. Majestyk, the first book he wrote after reading Higgins, does show a freer use of obscenities, and the amount of dialogue seems to have increased compared to 1969’s The Moonshine War, his second crime book. But Mr. Majestyk started life as a screenplay, after all. Perhaps for the same reason, the pace at which Leonard shifts points of view among his characters seems faster in Mr. Majestyk than in his previous work. However, even a cursory examination reveals little sylistic overlap between the two authors.
Higgins's narrative is almost entirely made up of long, rambling stories that his principal characters tell each other, full of colorful if occasionally (and intentionally) pointless digressions and the (presumably accurate) details of gun-trafficking, copping pleas, and underworld rules of engagement drawn from Higgins's years as a public prosecutor. Higgins captured the voices of his robbers, gunrunners, jaded cops, and hit men with unerring pitch-perfection. The combination of digression, detail, and patois blew Leonard away, but its impact on his writing was, I would argue, more a matter of degree than of kind: Leonard felt encouraged to do more of what he was already good at—dialogue and free indirect discourse—rather than transform his style in any radical way. He never was a fan of the long monologue, shunning first-person narration generally, and he didn't become one after reading Higgins, who uses practically no free indirect discourse, a form at which Leonard already excelled. With the exception of three brief shifts to third-person narration from the viewpoints of bank managers forced to cooperate with three robbers, practically everything in The Friends of Eddie Coyle is told in the voice of one or another criminal or law enforcement agent.
Higgins's biggest impact on Leonard's crime writing was in showing, first, what could be done with a sense of place that is taken for granted, continuously implied but rarely named or described in much detail, and second, how to do it with a particular kind of character based on a prototype, Jack Ryan, whom Leonard had first introduced in The Big Bounce. 52 Pickup, published in 1974 just after Mr. Majestyk, shows him beginning to apply the first lesson, and his next Detroit book, Swag, published in 1976, applies the second. For our purposes here, I’ll focus on the first lesson: establishing a sense of place with minimal use of recognizable streets or landmarks.
Boston is to The Friends of Eddie Coyle what Detroit would become to Leonard's crime books in general: a real-world milieu with a specific geographical ethos or character that emerges gradually, rather than in lengthy, explicit passages of narrative description. Higgins manages this emergence with patient discretion. On his first page, where Eddie Coyle allows "his coffee to grow cold" as he negotiates a gun deal with young hotshot Jackie Brown, an early rush hour crowd hurries by and a "crippled man hawk[s] Records, annoying people by crying at them from his skate-wheeled dolly" (3). These sparse but vivid details tell us only that the scene is set in an urban—probably downtown—coffee shop in a large American city with a needy and obtrusive underclass. On the next page, Coyle refers to a customer of his who "went to M.C.I. Walpole for fifteen to twenty-five" (4)—that is, for those in the know, the "Massachusetts Correctional Institution" in the Boston suburb of Walpole. On the same page, Coyle's story of being disciplined by his "nun" in school, coupled with his working-class diction and grammar, tells us we’re in a Catholic working-class town, and even though Coyle is just "the stocky man" so far, the title of the book gives away his Irish ethnicity. It's not until chapter two, when Higgins's characters drop a few more place names—"New Hampshire" (11), "Burlington," "Wrentham, Massachusetts," "Portland" (13)—that we can be fairly certain the book is set in the Boston area. But the name, "Boston," doesn't appear for another twenty pages or so, and aside from the opening scene none of the action has thus far taken place in Boston.
What's most striking about Higgins's technique for evoking a sense of place is its economy of resources, which enhances the naturalism of the voices telling the story: native inhabitants take their habitat for granted. They don’t need to give the people they’re talking to information they already know. Like priming a well, Higgins’s sparse details encourage the reader—the eavesdropper, as it were—to fill in the blanks with details from their own life experiences of, say, a coffee shop, an otherwise nondescript shopping center, a stop on a turnpike, a commuter train parking lot, a neighborhood bar, a decrepit stadium. For each reader, those details will be as different as the lives they have lived, but for all readers they will materialize and give personal relevance to a place that had by 1970 acquired a distinct public personality.
Higgins's Boston was already a down and out has-been, the former Birthplace of Freedom, Hub of the Universe, and City on a Hill that, like Humpty Dumpty, rolled off its perch early in the twentieth century and was still lying in shards. Its postwar image had been shaped by Edwin O'Connor's portrait of machine corruption in The Last Hurrah (1956); by the Standells' 1966 hit, "Dirty Water" (referring to the polluted Charles River); and by lurid news accounts of the Boston Strangler and the Irish Mob wars of the 1960s. By the time Higgins’s reader understands that this nameless city is Boston, with all that the name itself represents in the popular imagination, they’ve been given the chance to make it conform to the contours of their own imagination. The power of Higgins's spare but powerful evocation is registered in the book's transformative influence on the writing of American crime fiction to the present day. Before The Friends of Eddie Coyle appeared, Boston was a backwater on the generic map of noir fiction. Since its publication, Beantown has become practically the capital of Crimeland, its Emerald City, on screen and in print.
In 52 Pickup Leonard showed what he had learned from Higgins about creating a metropolitan mise en scene from scraps of information. The first chapter takes place entirely outside the urban center, at a generic townhouse kept by Harry Mitchell, a moderately wealthy, middle-aged factory owner whose mistress, Cini, has been living there for several months at his expense. The action is narrated in the third person from Harry's point of view, much in the way Higgins narrates portions of his book from the viewpoints of the three bank managers who are victimized by the robbers in Eddie Coyle. Harry arrives to find Cini gone, replaced by two men with stockings pulled over their heads, just like Higgins's gang members. They sit Mitchell down and show him movie footage of his trysts with Cini. They want $105,000 in exchange for the film, or they will send it to his wife, Barbara, and the local newspapers. The anonymous townhouse could be anywhere in suburban America, but a reference to Harry's residence in Bloomfield Hills and to the Dodge Main plant where he used to work on the assembly line ("Dodge" means "cars") help Leonard place it in the Detroit area.
The city itself, however, makes no appearance, either nominally or visually, until the beginning of the fourth chapter, when Harry begins his private investigation of how the blackmailers managed to use Cini in their shakedown scheme. Remembering that she used to pose in the nude for a sleazy "modeling" studio renting Polaroid cameras to men off the street, Harry finds himself standing outside what "had been a sporting goods store at one time—Mitchell remembered it because he had stolen a baseball glove from the place when he was in the seventh grade and his dad was working at the Ford Highland Park plant":
It was on Woodward six miles from downtown in a block of dirty sixty year old storefronts. The showcase windows of the sporting goods store were painted black now and white-wash lettering four feet high read: NUDE MODELS. (26)
There's a whole history of Detroit's civic implosion after the 1967 riots—racially, economically, and morally—inscribed in those starkly color-coded black and white panes of glass. Leonard points directly at that history a few pages later when ghetto pimp Bobby Shy, one of the blackmailers, hijacks a Gray Line sightseeing bus at gunpoint and tells the bus driver to take his customers on a tour of "the historic remains of the riot we had a few years ago" (34), while the passengers empty their valuables into a shopping bag held by his partner, Doreen. No need to explain which riot. Leonard expects his readers to recall the violent TV footage, headlines, and front-page news photos of seven years previously. Leonard’s city of apocalyptic violence and decay was already a media generated mythic site in their imaginations, just like Boston in the imaginations of Higgins’s readership.
The scene outside the former sports shop also had a private meaning for Leonard, which marks 52 Pickup, his first novel set in Detroit, as the occasion of his imaginative homecoming after more than two decades as a professional writer. This is the scene of his own first (and according to him, only) crime: shoplifting a catcher's mitt for his eighth-grade baseball team. Other details of Harry Mitchell's life align it more closely than that of any previous Leonard hero with the life of his creator. Mitchell and his wife are in their forties, with a son in college and a married daughter living in Cleveland. Leonard was in his late forties, with five kids, ranging from high school age to grown-up, when he wrote 52 Pickup. Mitchell is a World War II vet (Leonard served in the Pacific) and a self-made man who, like Leonard, went from working for others to working for himself, specifically, from an assembly-line job (similar to Leonard’s first adult job writing advertising copy for a Detroit firm) to being founder and owner of Ranco Manufacturing (similar to writing one’s own stories and books). Harry and Barbara live in Bloomfield Hills, not far from where Elmore and his first wife, Beverly, were then living.
By 1989, when Leonard writes City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, the last installment of the five 1970s Detroit novels I call the “Motor City Five,” the city’s geography has become so explicit that a reader can follow every car chase, stakeout, and trip to the convenience store as if on a GPS. I must confess that I relish these details, probably because they call to my mind a host of personal associations and memories extending back to my earliest years, tied to events that helped to make me who I am today. But I’m not sure that this degree of detail holds much intrinsic appeal for non-native readers, especially if they’ve never visited the city—unless they are already Elmore Leonard fans. In that case, the Detroit under construction in their minds as they read City Primeval will have its foundations, not in the bedrock of their memories, but in Elmore Leonard’s previous iterations of the Detroit he knew, which were in turn rooted deep in his own life-experiences.
Marianne Moore once wrote that poets create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” The best crime and detection writers, I think, re-create real cities with imaginary toads in them—hitmen, pimps, drug dealers, serial killers, gold-diggers and femmes fatales, crooked lawyers and cops on the take. But how best to imagine real cities? By larding your prose with real details? Or by leaving referential blank spaces into which readers can project images of the places and faces they already know? I guess it depends on exactly what kind of reader you’re aiming at. A reader who knows San Francisco may respond enthusiastically to Dashiell Hammett’s street-by-street evocation of the city in The Maltese Falcon, but someone who’s never been there or read anything about it may just find these details a distracting and pointless clutter. A reader who knows Baltimore may be disappointed by its nameless simulacrum in Hammett’s The Glass Key, but readers who grew up elsewhere may appreciate the opportunity to picture the city in ways they find more personally meaningful.
More of Hammett’s readers knew fabled San Francisco, even if they’d never been there, than knew humdrum Baltimore, even if they had.
Do the math.
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Notes:
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1) "The best crime book there is," he told Lawrence Grobel as late as 1998 (284). It was recommended by Leonard’s agent, H. N. “Swannie” Swanson.. For details, see Challen (76).