Missing in action …

… “Killing Them Softly,” “Rust and Bone” Reviews : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

If you want to grade postwar novelists on the strength of their ears alone—how fast they prick up at the crackle and blare of American speech—then [George V.] Higgins and Elmore Leonard, you could argue, lead the pack, ahead of more distinguished names. … One film paid suitable tribute: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973), directed by Peter Yates, and starring Robert Mitchum. The novel, of the same name, was Higgins’s first, and its opening sentence delivered the kind of measured slap that older readers would associate with their earliest hit of Hemingway: “Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.”