Higgins’ Strength Is the Talk of the Tome

We should give thanks that George V. Higgins doesn’t write westerns. He would be lost in those prairie silences, the “yups” and “nopes” of laconic cowboys. Talk is the air his fiction breathes, the medium in which his Massachusetts cops and pols and thugs and connivers operate--talk as thick and refractive as fog, making the moral issues viewed through it loom large even as it blurs their outlines.

Look at--or, rather, listen to--what happens in “The Agent,” Higgins’ 29th novel. Big-time sports agent Alexander Drouhin is negotiating contracts with a Boston Bruins hockey executive when a call comes over his cellular phone. One of his clients, star Buffalo Bills running back Bobby Moreno, is in jail after a fracas at a rural strip joint. Drouhin needs to bail him out, limit the scandal, protect his meal ticket.

Moreno is black, and so is F.D. Whitman, Drouhin’s junior partner, a former Minnesota Vikings defensive back. Drouhin, an NAACP member but a closet bigot, takes Whitman along for the midnight drive to the police station in Haymarket, a once-poor town that has discovered it can pay for computers in its schools if it welcomes adult businesses and taxes them.

Drouhin talks on his cellular phone to Jean Methodiste, a fading NHL goalie who is reluctant to accept role-player’s pay. We learn a good deal about the history of the agency, its not-unwilling participation in the corruption of American sports--the only true “culture of this country,” in Drouhin’s opinion--and their own edgy relationship.

Boston police see Drouhin’s Mercedes speed by but don’t ticket him. Just notify his office that he was seen, a veteran cop tells his rookie partner; you’ll get some choice Red Sox tickets. The police lieutenant in Haymarket who releases Moreno explains his town’s economics to Drouhin. He, too, wants to limit the scandal, and he, too, expects a reward.

Drouhin and Whitman take the drunken Moreno home. Drouhin spots an unopened letter for Moreno from a rival agent who has filed a class-action suit against Drouhin’s agency, alleging (accurately) that Drouhin’s clients have been overcharged. Drouhin steals the letter. He drives Whitman home. They argue about how the agency’s profits are split. (Drouhin gets half; the other 133 employees share the other half.) Then Drouhin returns to his 28-acre, security-gated estate, a good night’s work done.

In the morning, he is found dead. Shot twice in the face.

Inspector Frank Clay of the Massachusetts State Police hardly knows where to begin--Drouhin had so many enemies. He talks to the local police chief and to the medical examiner, Myrna Roscommon, daughter of an old cop who taught Clay all he knows. He talks to the caretakers at the estate, Rigo and Angela Catania, who were grateful for what Drouhin paid them but didn’t like the orgies and drugs that came with the athletes he entertained, not to mention Drouhin’s gay lover.

Clay talks to his bright young assistant. He talks to Pete Martigneau, a former police officer who became Drouhin’s chief of security. He talks to Whitman. As the talk goes on and on, we realize that Higgins makes it serve many of the narrative and characterizing functions that other writers assign to exposition and interior monologue--a good thing, too, because Higgins’ exposition is as awkward as his talk is famously canny and supple.

Still, as in his last novel, “A Change of Gravity,” Higgins seems mesmerized by his own skill. Then with politics, now with sports, he describes a subculture that is deeply but not always reprehensibly crooked. Its denizens, with their tough and sophisticated voices, challenge us to judge them. In “Gravity,” we were led to side with the accused rather than with the Kenneth Starr-like prosecutor. In “The Agent,” Higgins is cooler toward his characters but just as fascinated. The talk goes on so long that we notice when he finally snaps out of his trance, shakes his head, remembers that Clay has a mystery to solve and lets him solve it.