I read The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George Higgins, for my neighborhood book club. Tremendous fun, although the white male default perspective is often alarming, and you can see why someone might decide they were just going to read Walter Moseley, Chester Himes, or Tana French if they wanted to read this genre. Higgins crafts the hardboiled crime novel by using a distinctive style, mostly dialogue, eschewing all help for the reader, who is presumed to know all the context for what they are reading. As a very avid reader of course one can really enjoy that. Empirically, I wonder if someone who was not fully accultured to American popular culture and history of the 1960s-70s would enjoy reading the novel, or whether it would require frequent, “Wait what is this?”