I know the author of this splendid piece on George V Higgins and have always admired his work when he was an editor at the Globe, Although I didn't know Mr Higgins, but he lived about a half mile down the road from me in Hingham, Ma. before he left the area. Maybe because too much riff-raff was invading the area. Mr Nolan played handball at the Sheraton Tara in Braintree with the late Tom Flately, a genious in his own way. And I would run into Martin from time to time at the Penalty Box before a Celtics game. Thanks for a great story on a talented writer.

There is no bigger GVH fan than me, and I like his more discursive novels as well, at least most of them, one or two were dense to the point of being incomprehensible.  The "Life is hard but it's harder when you're stupid" line, as I found out when I used it and attributed it to GVH and got slapped around on a blogsite, is not original.  John Wayne said it in "Sands of Iwo Jima."  Google the line and you'll go right to it.  Read "A Choice of Enemies" and a lot of what you read in the paper about the endemic corruption under the Golden Dome will make more sense.  A protagonist loosely based on John "the Iron Duke" Thompson, a Massachusetts House Speaker who didn't go to jail, but probably should have.