crosses—it is finally about nothing other than language itself." In a retrospective 2010 review, Slate said the book "holds up as both a writer's-writer thriller and as popular pulp." The book review website The Pequod rated the book a 9.5 (out of 10.0) and called it a "superb crime novel... The book’s characters and conversations are highly realistic, based no doubt on real individuals Higgins encountered on the job, and the cops are nearly as dishonorable as the criminals. While the plot is somewhat undeveloped, Higgins knows his characters well and writes some of the best dialogue that has ever appeared in an American crime novel." Adaptations The novel was adapted into a 1973 film, and a stage play by Bill Doncaster. Sources The character Eddie Coyle bore an uncanny resemblance to ex-convict William (Billy) O'Brien, one of James J. "Whitey" Bulger's old bank-robbing associates who had been murdered in 1967, three years before the book's publication. O'Brien, like Coyle, had just been arrested and the newspapers reported that O'Brien's associates were concerned that he might become a turncoat. O'Brien's slaying was never solved, nor was Coyle's. During the making of the movie in the Boston area, actor Robert Mitchum (who was cast as Eddie Coyle) was interested in meeting the local gangsters as part of his research into the part. Journalist George Kimball, a sportswriter on the Boston Herald at the time, claimed that Mitchum wanted to meet Whitey Bulger and was warned against it by Higgins. Kimball claims that the two did actually socialize, though there is doubt that a meeting between Mitchum and Bulger ever took place. What is known is that cast member Alex Rocco, a native of Somerville, introduced Mitchum to local Irish-American gangsters of his acquaintance, including Howie Winter of the Winter Hill Gang that Bulger belonged to. (Born Alexander Petricone, Jr., Rocco had been a hanger-on of the Winter Hill Gang who had been held for questioning in the murder of Charlestown Mob member Bernie McLaughlin, an incident that had touched off the Boston Irish Gang War of the 1960s. After being released from jail, Petricone left Boston for Los Angeles in 1962, where he became an actor.) Howie Carr, a newspaper columnist and radio personality who has written extensively on the Boston underworld, reports that Mitchum dined with Winter and Johnny Martorano (whom Carr described as a co-leader of the Winter Hill