I’ve been recently buffeted about by The Digger’s Game, a novel by the late George V. Higgins. I haven’t read much crime fiction but feel strangely comfortable saying Higgins is the best.
The fiction is dialogue driven–with characters occasionally letting loose shards of backstory and explanation to create and color the narrative. Here’s a fragment from early in The Digger’s Game. A robbery is in its planning phases, and the robber (The Digger) is speaking with one of the crime’s organizers (the driver):
“Chickenshit outfit,” the Digger said.
“Well,” the driver said, “it’s really just for the typewriters and, you know, in case the junkies come in and start tearing the place apart. They don’t keep any real dough there. It’s just for intruders, is all.”
“Trespassers,” the Digger said.
“Yeah,” the driver said, “trespassers. Speaking of which, I assume you’re not a shitter or anything.”
“No,” the Digger said.
“You know you’re not a shitter, too, don’t you?” the driver said.
“Well, I’m pretty sure,” the Digger said. “I never done much of this, but when I been in some place, I never did, no.”
“Well, in case you get the urge,” the driver said, “wait till you get home or something.”
According to Wikipedia, Higgins “liked to point out that accurate dialogue was not a verbatim transcription of things said but an imaginative recreation in compressed form.” Often praised for his dialogue, Higgins separates real life speech from accurate dialogue. For him, the description of strong dialogue, “so real it spits,” would be more accurately (if less sonorously) changed to “so imaginatively recreated in compressed form“that it spits.” Higgins hits on one of the problems of using “real” to describe representative art. We, as readers, don’t want what’s real. Full of “ums” and “uhs,” reality makes us wait too long for the exciting parts.