The Judgment of Deke Hunter

by George V. Higgins

Dust jacket shows very light shelf wear at the edges

Genres: 20th Century, Fiction

Paperback

First published January 12, 1978

About the author

George Vincent Higgins was a United States author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, and college professor. He is best known for his bestselling crime novels.

Reviews

[WJEP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Half the book was about Cpl. Deke Hunter's dissatisfaction with his career, wife, inlaws, and mistress. The other half was about the trial of some bankrobbers that Deke arrested. Both parts were filled with Higgins' thick, wisecracking dialog (although there was more actual narration in this book than usual). It takes extra concentration to follow Higgins oblique storytelling and I don't think the payoff was big enough in the end. The trial and behind-the-scenes courthouse finagling was satisfying. On the last page and a half, Higgins tries to wrap up Deke's wreckage of a life but I didn't buy it.

Out of print. I read it on archive.org.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding. I had previously read and loved Higgins's first three books, all of which have much in common. This one, however, is different--most notably in that it's about a cop, but also in that it tackles the cop's domestic life in almost equal weight to his attempt to get convictions on a band of bank robbers.

Of course, it's all dialogue and all of Higgins's brand: early on, Deke Hunter tells his father-in-law, "I'm looking for a guy, and I haven't got very much time to find him. And I'd better find the son of a bitch, because his buddies're going to trial in a couple of months or so up in Salem, and if we're convicting them, which we're gonna do, we're gonna have to use a guy that the guy I can't find doesn't know about yet, and as soon as we use him, if I haven't found the guy, the guy we got to use is dead." It all makes sense as one reads--but the book is so rich and complicated in spots that the reader will have to reread conversations and thumb back through others and be rewarded by thoughts like, "OK--so that's why the lawyer wouldn't say anything." The mystery, the draw, isn't as much what will happen in the courtroom as the fun the reader has keeping everything straight. Yes, there's the criminal plot, but the scenes with Deke and his wife are just as good. The only time the reader doesn't get dialogue is when he gets paragraphs about jury selection or procedures--and these are all written in a clinical, factual style.

One caution: Higgins's books, including this one, are often petty vulgar in the strictest sense of the word--not in terms of "bad words," but in bad deeds described. Don't lend these to your maiden aunt or seventh grader. Still, the vulgarity all works to propel the novel and add to the reader's impression of the characters. Higgins has absolute respect for his reader's intelligence.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has become a yearly ritual for me, right around the end of summer, to dip into another George V. Higgins novel. I have never read an author who presents stories in quite this way. Deke Hunter is an improvement over his previous novel, A City on a Hill, and very much up to the heady standards of his opening trio of genre-changing novels.

You'd think that a novel told almost entirely in dialogue would be a breeze to read, but Higgins' dialogue is so dense and elliptical that you really have to bear down and focus. What exposition there is is almost perversely reportorial: "Michael Donovan on the morning of November 21, 1973, wore a dark blue doubleknit suit with brass buttons ... He was bald. He wore black-framed glasses. He had a very light complexion. He weighed one hundred and seventy pounds. He was five feet, ten inches tall. He was thirty-eight years old."

But you soon realize that this deadened narration is really used to clear the space for the characters, to have no authorial intrusion over the symphony of voices. And it works. Somehow it works. I wouldn't recommend binging on Higgins novels, but to space them out as I have so far, reading his novels becomes a real treat.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Higgins is as amazing a dialogue writer as they in the know say. And on another note, it's not enough that characters talk about buying things at Zayre and Child World, one of them has to meet his mistress in a motel in Woonsocket. Warm fuzzies.

[Anthony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Medium Higgins - the first 40 pages could be cut at no loss, he experiments more with prose to mixed results - there are some banger conversations towards the last third, but until then it's grotesque, and somehow dull. You're ultimately reading a story about a shit guy who decides to more willfully embrace his shit guy nature, and it's just okay.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slow and anticlimactic. The dialogue is good, which is Higgins' trademark, but the whole book feels like all talk and no action. Hardly any description or action other than speech tags. Parts are good, but the book drags more than it hits.

[Graham Techler]

First GVH to really bounce for me. Try as I might I could not work up momentum with this one or really follow the story outside of the (more compelling) domestic scenes.

[False · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another book set between Boston-Washington-New York and the Cape and Islands. His continued fascination with politics and lawyers in D.C. I've been reading a run on these. I prefer when he writes about and captures the underworld. He excelled at that.

[Greg Roe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoy Higgins, and this one certainly did not disappoint.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not feeling this one. Higgins is always elliptical, but this was like every other chapter had been ripped out of the book.