The Rat on Fire

by George V. Higgins

A riveting, blistering novel about the shady side of the law and the business side of the Boston underworld by the one and only George V. Higgins.
 
Jerry Fein is a small-time lawyer, occasional booking agent, and full-time slumlord. But he’s nobody’s fool. So when the tenants of his dilapidated buildings refuse to pay rent because of rats, Jerry knows just the man to help him—Leo Proctor, a professional arsonist, who can make a fire marshal look the other way for a little cash. But the heat is on over at the police station as well, and a couple of cops are suddenly feeling pressure from their superiors to produce tangible results, and something has got to give.
 
Full of showboating politicians, hardnosed cops, and lawyers a little too familiar with both sides of the law, The Rat on Fire is another Higgins masterpiece and an unflinching portrait of the Boston crime world.  

Genres: Crime, Fiction, Thriller, Noir, Mystery, Novels

194 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 12, 1981

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

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A juicy and delicious novel in which the story moves forward entirely through dialog. I say delicious because the language of the working class is rendered in such a pleasing manner. It is almost like a play filled with racist and mysogynistic characters, but you still wish you could have a drink with Proctor and Malsetta, just once maybe, because you don't want to be friends with people who would rat each other out at the drop of a hat. The touchy and the easily offended, I do not recommend this novel for you.

The Rat on Fire is a crime novel in which nothing much happens. Just a bunch of alcoholic imbeciles with criminal tendencies sitting in bars and Scandinavian pastry shops planning arson, bitching about their wives/girlfriends and families and telling tall tales. Every single character sounds the same but there is a delicious scene in an exclusive bar with a bar tender who eats olives.

There is something beguiling about the lives of the lowlife of the greatest country on earth. I keep writing this line for all my reviews of Elmore Leonard novels. It is perfect for this book as well. Who did George V Higgins write this novel for? I bet he was drunk when he wrote this all up. I mean, arsonists trying to gather rats to create a fire in a tenement filled with black people who do not pay rent. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

[WJEP · Rating 4 out of 5]

You are eavesdropping on Leo, and you are eavesdropping on the undercover cops who are also eavesdropping on Leo. That's how Higgins tells the story. You need to pay attention. I got a couple chapters in and realized that I wasn't sure who was doing the talking and what they were talking about. So I had to start this yammerfest over from the beginning.

Leo Proctor is a shitheel and scumbag. He chews a lot of fat. Why are the cops listening? Because he is planning to exterminate some deadbeat tenants:

"Muhfuck, I ain’t payin’ you no rent."

I was expecting a wicked good last act, but the ending fizzled. The title is not a metaphor .

[Jonathan Ammon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost gave this one five stars; it was that much fun. Like many crime novels this features vile, wretched people. The plot is simple and straightforward. Higgins intentionally telegraphs the ending from the start. And then he pulls you into a masterclass of dialogue and speeches which makes up 95% of the novel. This is not realistic dialogue, but it’s realistic and grounded enough and oh so entertaining. A page turner in spite of all the action being off the page between scenes of conversation. I can’t help but think of a few famous filmmakers who have deliberately followed Higgins in relying on character and dialogue to such a high extent.

[Rafa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Curioso libro en el que cada capítulo es un diálogo entre personajes que se entrecruzan, casi parece un guion de cine, y que van creando una historia de corrupción obligada, de grises muy oscuros en el que nadie queda libre de mancha.

Con un lenguaje cuya incorrección haría que hoy en día fuera imposible escribirlo, o mejor, publicarlo, tenemos ante nosotros un libro que sin ser una obra maestra se lee con ganas y hasta, en algunos momentos, con una naciente sonrisa en la comisura de los labios. Con los tiempos que corren, no es decir poco.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*

[Hobart Mariner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Corrupt fire marshals conspire with slumlords and insurance-claim arsonists; the Boston PD must stop them. It's not that heroic: most of the book is taken up with complaints. This is a novel of bitching, mainly about mundane things like the price of gas and groceries. Whether someone is a single Black mother living in a squalid tenement, or the entertainment agent/lawyer who owns said tenement, or the cop who investigates the owner for plotting to burn down the tenement, the outcome is the same: life is a bunch of shit that you do not need right now. The dialogue often comes in long multi-paragraph soliloquies about what a pain in the ass it is to deal with various lowlifes, often including one's wife or friends. This is a true comic novel, it's very funny, and Higgins is so perfectly attuned to the nuances and curlicues of the Boston dialect that you can hear it coming off the page. But it's not as powerful as Eddie Coyle or Cogan's Trade. There's less tension than Carter-era malaise. There's some of the gastric distress you see in The Digger's Game, but it's not as cartoonish, merely one more depressing facet of Boston life at the dawn of the Reagan era.

Stylistically, there's a lot to love. Having your moron goons latch on to a fancy word like transcend or transpire and overuse it is something that Higgins, who logged hundreds of hours listening to them on wiretaps, can put fresh life into. "A little of you goes a considerable distance." "[D]oing a lot of work on his thirst in a couple bars down on Old Colony Boulevard and Broadway, and Jimmy doesn't drink so well." The ugly, racist toughguy talk spans every possible class of society, from the lowest abetter to the bourgeois lawyer (TW!). There's also nice little descriptions, although Higgins isn't a landscape painter: the summer heat brings "long tracks of vicious-looking lightning," a violently hammered guy is "swaying very slightly." If you like the Boston tough Higgins dialogue, this book has it, although not as much as Coyle, Digger, or Cogan.

Another device he uses to good effect is lacing the dialogue between arsonist and fire marshal with banal patter between two truckers (actually undercover cops) who complain about the lack of cheese danish and the cost of engine repairs. Higgins is a dialogue man and he can overlay the real and artificial complaints to get some good ironic effect.

Higgins isn't quite as strong on his Black characters, perhaps not the biggest surprise. Initially they are only an obstacle that the entertainment attorney/slumlord Fein must overcome. Then we meet Mavis Davis, a somewhat angelic older single mother, and Fein's lone "good" tenant, whose soon Alfred is a bit of a problem. Higgins gives Mavis a multi-page soliloquy about the difficulties of life that shows she's not that different from the white crooks who are conspiring to destroy her home, and there's some good little wrinkles in her speech, but mostly she is just pure good. Her son Alfred is just not that interesting of a character, and that's kind of a problem because he winds up being very important to the plot, and it's boring when a boring character drives the plot.

I wouldn't start a Higgins newbie on this one (Coyle, duh) but it's got ample comedic dialogue and superb local touches.

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

People don’t play fair in the Boston underworld of George V. Higgins. To live outside the law and avoid being lit up like some skell on a skewer in The Rat on Fire, you must be dishonest—that’s a given. But dishonesty alone is not enough to save Higgins’s ill-intentioned malefactors from a flaring demise. One complicating factor is that an aptitude for deceit is also prevalent among the cops who play foil to the crooks. Furthermore, credible intentions are difficult to discern in the attorneys who represent, co-conspire with and extort capital-felony favors from the sore losers striving to be players in this late 1970s milieu of mooks and mugs. The plentiful and hyper-paced dialogue, as anyone who cheerleads for Higgins will attest, is a delight of florid, crap-talking gutter poetry. At once hilarious with its street-level dissertations against highly regarded social constructs and jolting in its casual barbarity toward all manner of race, gender and human infirmity, Higgins’s word torrent, when all is said and done, presents a sober argument that the rats are right to fear us.

[Philip Girvan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Breezed through this yesterday morning. While it doesn’t rank with his best, it’s entertaining.

[Scott McKenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five word review: Nothing but dialogue. Freakin' hilarious

[Freddie the Know-it-all · Rating 5 out of 5]

You Knuckleheads Will Never Learn

All this shit is so obvious, but you knuckleheads will never learn.

You got a 0.0001% chance of getting rich by being a landlord. You got a 100% chance of having a 168-hour-a-week job and every single problem these guys have. But, if it wasn't this bad idea, I'm sure you'd wanna Open a Little Italian Restaurant. Or maybe Open a Cozy Little Bed 'n' Breakfast.

I can't count the number of people I've warned about this over the years.

But you knuckleheads will never learn to listen to your betters.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great dialogue as always and entertaining, too. Not much of a plot but still more than a standard let's-catch-a-killer type stuff (they plan on doing insurance fraud with rats soaked in gasoline, but they're being spied on by cops). But it didn't hook me like The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Killing Them Softly or the Kennedy for the Defense series did. The book's also a little bit more ambitious in scope, but it doesn't quite work because everyone's still talking like a wiseguy.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Higgins patent mix of lawyers, cops and small-time criminals, with crackling wiseguy dialogue and a smoothly rolling plot (in there somewhere!). Each individual chapter is a sparkling, mutant-Dickensian gem, and although the whole in this case is not quite up to the dizzily high standard of The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, this is still a funny/entertaining solid 4 stars.

[Rex Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

The waitress smacked her gum, poured the coffee, and said, “Freshen you up?”
“Not sure ‘freshen’s' the right word there.”
She side-eyed him, smacked again, spun and pranced away. They watched.
“Remember Georgie there? Mick grew up in Rockland. Down the US Attorney’s? Till he died.”
“Sure and your people? They never didn’t know who’s where before Revere rode his horse. Was your uncle Timmy missed out that slot to Georgie Higgins. A’course I knew him. Went t‘is funeral. Same as you.”
“Somethin’s goin’ on. Never saw but maybe once another, claim for insurance reopened. This late.”
“S’been a while.”
“Cause of death was ‘heart attack.’”
“Like lots a’ guys. Smoked and drank and it happens. And some were snub-nosed .38 caliber heart attack.”
“An' medical examiners’ kids went to college.”
“You sayin’ somethin’? Georgie's gone the US Attorney’s a while he died.”
“An' who’d he represent? His private practice there. Across the board he was, the whole fresh from a lumber mill board. Black Power types. Watergate guys. An’ he got fired or quit a time or two. You think them guys they carry their copies the Marquess a’ Queensbury Rules their back pockets? My Aunt Annie got her divorce in ‘54. Rest of her life it was ‘that flippin’ lawyer’ an’ ‘that commie lawyer’ represented her. Sold her out she thought. Would’a cut his neck she could, even sweet as she was. Now my dear aunt, God’s grace on her soul, could do that, you don’t think guys not scared a’ Capone or Castro could? An’ all those books he wrote? Ones they said he hid the story with a storm a’ dialogue. Hadda come from somewhere. Like that one ‘Rat on Fire’ with the rats used for torchin’ a building? Can’t just make that up. Laughed my ass off.”
“Could’a been he wrote somethin.’ He shouldn’t’ve. Maybe somethin’ not funny to a guy. But he could write it. It was somethin’? He could write it.”
“Worst mistake we ever make’s one we don’t know we did.”

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong stuff from Higgins's peak period

A book like this will always suffer by comparison to, say, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE or THE DIGGER'S GAME. But it's got just about everything that makes those books so great, just in a less mob-centric but no less high-stakes crime situation. It also stares the racism of Boston's landlords, lawyers and other lowlifes right in the face and doesn't blink, to the point where their dialogue can be immensely uncomfortable to read. (As a sidebar, the book only has a handful of Black characters, but none of them seem like stereotypes; they all read like the complicated stew of characteristics and neuroses that all of us are.)

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't recall ever reading a story that revolved around arson. I've read plenty where arson was involved, but never where it was the centerpiece. Here, a few slumlords aren't satisfied with their tenants, so they conspire to burn them out of the properties. The tale gets told from the police perspective, the crooks and the victims as well. So, while the thrills and tense action may be missing, it's more than made up for with Higgins unique talent for storytelling via dialogue only.

Higgins stories are mostly told through conversations before and after the fact of the action, but that is where his work shines. He captures the working class foul mouth that is bedazzled with slurs, overflowing with tangents, insults, gripes, put downs and all. It's practically Shakespeare. Simple things like calling someone a four-flusher really cracks me up, and I know with Higgins I am going to laugh and/or try to remember to pass off some of his golden phrases as my own.

If you enjoy stories about rats crawling over each other to keep from drowning this is a great read.

[Sean Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Rat On Fire" by George V. Higgins is the concerns a group of unsavory landlords and thugs planning an arson and a group of state troopers trying to catch them. In classic Higgins fashion nearly the entire book is dialogue with a bit of description setting up each conversation. Any action that happens is presented after the fact in a conversation where one character describes it to another.

Higgins is an absolute master at the particular Boston brand of thug/cop conversational style. The book is worth reading if only for the conversation between the state troopers in the first chapter. While still essential reading for fans of crime fiction this particular work sits a bit below "Cogan's Trade" and "Friends of Eddie Coyle" in the Higgins canon. The dialogue is fantastic, but without more than just dialogue certain parts feel like a script missing stage directions.

[Jure · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love character and dialogue driven plots so this one should be 5/5 and it actually was for the first third or so. But the whole setup takes way too long before some action finally kicks off and by then it loses a lot of its initial momentum. Also dialogs become repetitive, tedious and too long so at times it feels like you are stuck inside some endless monologues. It still works and plot sticks together but everything simply becomes a bit boring to be honest.

Good and interesting stuff, but it feels more like an experiment than finished product. I'll be definitely checking Higgins again.

More here (review includes spoilers!):
http://a60books.blogspot.ie/2014/11/t...

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is what many are wary of with Higgins' works: it's something that damn near reads as a wiretap transcript, and not entertainingly so. Where "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" seemed to move along with purpose, in this story, the characters monologue seemingly without end, and the story seemed to conclude too abruptly at the finish. I had a pervasive feeling of "Who cares?" when reading this book - it really, truly lacked a hook. I thought I would end up caring if the characters would ever get around to burning down the damn building, but I did not, even if there was a promise of using rats to do so. Too bad.

[Jason McCracken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fuck me there's some dialogue in this... It's pretty much 99% dialogue. Luckily it's pretty funny dialogue because the plot ain't the thickest. I got through it in a day and never once got bored so 4 stars from me and I'll definitely be checking out some more George Higgins in the very near future I'd reckon.

[Stephen J. Golds · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one writes dialogue like Higgins. He was a genius for dialogue. Literature’s Quentin Tarantino.

Rat on Fire is another well written story from the gutters of Boston about an insurance scam that goes wrong.

What I’ve always liked about Higgins is that he hardly wrote descriptions and concentrated on dialogue so you can imagine everything for yourself.

5/5

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Higgins is certainly a master of dialogue....

[Hannah Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I mean… if you want to read about trashy people doing trashy things… maybe it’s for you?

[Peter G · Rating 2 out of 5]

Leo Procter is a slumlord whose dirty and unmaintained buildings somehow still can’t turn a profit. In need of some quick cash to satisfy the bankers, as well as a lawyer to beat some moronic drink-driving charges, he gets drawn into an arson scheme with another slumlord he knows called Jerry Fein. Leo and Fein seem to think they’re far more slick than they are, and go through the motions of making sure the job can slip by unnoticed — buying off bent cops, making alibis, making sure the houses are cleared out of people, and gathering rats as an evidence-free delivery mechanism. But, since this is a Higgins novel, the cops are already more or less onto them from the get-go. This taut, bleak, and fatalist book moves, beat-by-irresistable-beat, towards a fairly obvious endpoint.

Well, five books in and I’m sort of losing my patience with Higgins. His obvious gifts are still there — great dialogue and an insider’s view of criminal activity — but the further from Eddie Coyle he gets the less he seems interested in drawing things all together. By all measures, he was an incredibly prolific writer throughout his brief career, and reading his stories back to back like I have been, you do start to wonder if he shouldn’t have spent a bit more time both on condensing his narratives, and on elaborating the ideas he barely brushes past. One more Eddie Coyle would be worth three more of The Rat on Fire and its ilk. By this point, it almost seems like Higgins was proud of pushing his readers’ buttons.

I’ll give this to The Rat on Fire; it is his most thematically cohesive novel since his debut. I’d guess that about 80% of the whole book just about is people complaining about their jobs. The whole sick systems shown here is like a microcosm of life under capitalism. The characters are members of the lumpenproletariat, criminal and sleazy, but basically replicating the larger structures of capitalism, but more brutal, and even more starkly unfair, and with their unworthy horrible selves at the top. Here’s Fein, squeezing every last bit of money from his tenants and bitching at page length about how unprofitable it all is. He seems, like so many exploiters, more than affronted when he’s asked to provide any sort of real services in return. His put his money in, now he wants to get it back out. The few glimpses we see into the apartment buildings he owns is heartbreaking. For Fein, he barely sees them as human. But there’s no real morality from the police in this story. He’s just another job they’re taking care of to get a break from some political pressure. Everyone’s squeezing someone else.

Hanging over this work, and quite vividly so, is the notion that Higgins could have done so much more with the raw ingredients of this story.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine hearing an entire story just by being a "fly on the wall" and listening to the main characters in the story. Of course, these would have to be some pretty interesting characters who are caught up in a pretty interesting situation, because if you're like me, you put on your headphones as soon as two other people sit down near you on the train. The public, by and large, do not talk about interesting things in public.

But in George Higgins' world, they do. "Listen" to how one character describes his wife's would-be divorce lawyer:

"Crystal don't make any stink, I fool around a little, sometimes I don't come home. But if I tell her I want a divorce, that is gonna be a different thing, my friend. She will come after me with a lawyer who swims in the water and nobody else goes in when he's taking a dip. They put bulletins on the radio. I don't think so. I had a good time with Gail, but I'm not pushing my luck like that, pissing away everything I got. I worked too hard for it."

As good as Higgins is at writing dialogue, I'm convinced some of the things he writes goes beyond creative writing. Some things, you either have to experience it yourself or you have to talk to someone who has experienced it. I'd bet that, in his time as a journalist, someone told Higgins what it's like to use a toilet in the middle of the night in a jail cell:

"Only thing there is good about being in the slammer--toilet's right there. 'Course there was one guy I was in the cell with, and it didn't matter how you peed down the side of the bowl there, he would wake up and pretend he was still sleepin' and grab your cock while you were going at it."

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Higgins' hard-boiled, dialogue-driven novels about low-level Boston criminals are compulsively readable, full of dirtbag poetry, humor, and desperation, and The Rat on Fire is no exception, though its characters are mostly so unpleasant I had a slightly less enjoyable time reading this one. In his tale of white landlords and a few hired goons plotting to torch their own buildings in black neighborhoods to collect the insurance money, Higgins creates a believably revolting (though occasionally hilarious) smorgasbord of bitter, tired criminals, shady businessmen, corrupt lawyers and fire marshals, and undercover detectives who blame their wives, black people, and liberals for all their petty grievances and financial troubles. Since this also describes, at least in part, the cabal of losers turning our country into a fascist hellhole, I sometimes just felt like I was reading a more eloquent version of some of my uncles' and cousins' Facebook posts, with an arson twist. (I'm admittedly selling Higgins' great dialogue a little short here.) This curdled atmosphere gains complexity and greater perspective when Higgins introduces four black characters halfway through the book (a senator and attorney representing the district of the apartment building residents, a funeral home owner, a woman living in one of the buildings about to be torched, and her troubled son) as the novel's events converge. I also enjoyed Higgins' description of the bartender of a private club reading a different magazine on each day of his shift (Newsweek on Wednesday, Sports Illustrated on Thursday, etc.) and eating an olive after finishing each page.

[JPG · Rating 3 out of 5]

183 pages to tell a story that could’ve been told in 63 pages. :-).
Not that I mind too much you understand, because I do enjoy the “lyrical“ way that George V. Higgins has his blue collar, Boston-based, low life characters, converse with each other. The trouble is that this is my fifth Higgins read, and after reading his seminal first published novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Cogan’s Trade, (saw their excellent film counterparts as well) and The Diggers Game, I think I’ve had enough of excessive banter from boorish characters who all seem to hate their wives, are as cynical as all get out and can’t tell a straight story without many times meandering into ridiculous metaphors and extremely tangential minutiae.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big Higgins fan and love his work, but I think I hit my limit. Another book by Higgins I do recommend is “On Writing“ which is basically his extended essay on how to approach and work at being a professional writer. It’s a very good read, especially if you are in the trade.

Sorry, but for the reasons above, I couldn’t get beyond a three star rating for this one.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shocking and graphic in its urban ugliness and absence of posturing, the dialogue is completely hilarious. This, even as it captures (over many, many pages) tragic events surrounding corrupt slumlords, cops, arsonists, criminals, and the miserable poor of Boston who have to endure the worst of it. Higgins writes the best conversations, so much so that if you read them out loud, they sound better. It's hard to listen to any other crime writer who considers himself/herself gritty and compare words. Nobody talks like Higgins' characters, and they sound as authentic as all the grimy, dangerous, yet mundane environments they inhabit. And this book is definitely Rated R for language. Thank God.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short take:

The book is almost entirely dialogue, with some gems like:

“Well now,” Proctor said to Dannaher, “I will tell what I did. When you didn’t show up, you poor excuse for a human man.”

Everyone—police, lawyers, politicians, criminals—is a bit of a wise guy, and some characters go on page-long rants to make a point. The plot is minimal and never gets tense.

Altogether, I was entertained.

[Jake Cadieux · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you’re up for a quick pulpy read, this is a good place to start. Without exaggeration this book is about 90% dialogue, and in these diatribes you can feel the framework for the scripts in flicks like The Departed or The Town; Boston hustlers and scum of the earth womanizers and drunks alike. It’s fun, but it didn’t do much for me to stimulate the brain - I turned the last page and said aloud “that’s it?”. On to Friends of Eddie Coyle I go.

[Rodger Payne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dialogue is very natural, which is probably why I read this book. I think I read an interview with Elmore Leonard that recommended it, but I don't recall now as the book has been on my shelf for some years. It's ok as a crime book and has a couple of ok characters, but the plot is a little thin.