Couple of interesting bits from the book
I’ve now read the book. My edition has a foreword by Elmore Leonard which reads:
“Higgins’s agent at the time of ‘Eddie Coyle’ read the manuscript, told him it was unsalable and dropped him.”
How do you like that? Higgins’ ex-agent must have had plenty of regrets over losing the percentage he would have made if he’d stuck with Higgins and “Eddie Coyle”!
(SPOILER) The book also cleared one up one loose end for me. After Dillon invites Coyle to the hockey game, he tells Coyle to come back to the bar at 6. It always occurred to me that Eddie very logically might call his wife Sheila and tell her, “Hon, I’ll be home late tonight—Dillon invited to me to a Bruins game.” Had he had done that, Sheila could have told the cops Eddie had been with Dillon on the night of the shooting—putting Dillon right on the hot seat. In the book, however, Dillon takes care of this. Eddie says he’s going to call his wife, but Dillon tells him not to because “we might run into something” (girls). So Dillon covers this base.