In case you wondered …

… How George V. Higgins Invented the Boston Crime Novel | CrimeReads. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The world of Higgins’s first three novels is where the Boston crime genre still largely resides in the popular imagination, but the author himself wasn’t content to keep exploring this one particular slice of the city. In the decades that followed, he chronicled cops (The Judgment of Deke Hunter), politicians (A Choice of Enemies), defense attorneys (the Jerry Kennedy quartet), and high society (Swan Boats at Four), expanding his Boston canvas far beyond the working-class Irish neighborhoods that spawned his memorable crooks. Though he would return to that world occasionally (Trust, The Rat on Fire), he disdained being known as a crime writer. Not all of the books hold up. At times the deadpan humor is lost and his thickets of dialogue become virtually impenetrable, providing camouflage to stories that unfold on an almost subliminal level.