You must read (and watch) Eddie Coyle

The first thing to know about George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that it directly entered the crime-fiction canon upon its 1970 publication. The second thing to know is that it holds up as both a writer's-writer thriller and as popular pulp, with Dennis Lehane introducing Picador's new 40th-anniversary reissue of the novel by heralding it as "the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years"—a moderate claim compared with that of Elmore Leonard, who hails it as the best crime novel, period. The third thing to know about The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that, as Lehane beat me to quipping, Eddie Coyle doesn't actually have any friends. When "my friend" is said in these pages, it is used with far less affection than in the case of a guy at a bodega or a coffee cart man addressing a patron

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