The Rat on Fire

'Higgins...has arranged the conventions of the crime novel into something new: oblique, bleak and often graveyard funny' THE SUNDAY TIMES When the tenants of Jerry Fein's dilapidated buildings refuse to pay the rent on account of the rats, Jerry drafts in arsonist Leo Proctor to take care of the problem. After all, the place is insured and the fire marshall's back is turned, so what could go wrong?

Every American crime writer of the past 30 years owes a debt to George V Higgins. Higgins is the daddy. Read him and rejoice

Auteur
George V. Higgins was a lawyer in the Massachusetts Attorney General's office, in the Organized Crime section and the Criminal Division, and an Assistant United States Attorney, in Boston. He then founded his own private practice, defending Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Described as 'the Balzac of the Boston underworld', he wrote more than twenty novels, including a number of lowlife masterpieces constructed almost entirely out of pitch-perfect dialogue. He died in 1999.