Although popular and prolific, Higgins has never allowed himself to fall into formula fiction. The three Kennedy novels, with their lawyer protagonist, come closest to genre fiction. But three novels over fifteen years hardly suggests factory work, and, in fact, Jerry Kennedy bears almost no resemblence at all to that mechanical paragon of lawyer-series/protagonists, Perry Mason. Erie Stanley Gardner was the master of very flat, very efficient expository dialogue; George V, Higgins's mastery of the textures of realistic speech serve his quite different art of fiction.