Part of Series
Alo Nudger, the St. Louis ex-cop whose office is just upstairs from Danny's Donuts, is both the most normal of all fictional private eyes and the most surprising. He's got an uncertain stomach he doses with nonstop antacids; he doesn't like guns or violence; and since he doesn't feel any special affinity for what he does, from nosing into people's dirty laundry to confronting perps with the consequences of their misdeeds, and makes more than his share of mistakes, it's only natural that his business cards identify him in typographical error as a private defective. In the rest of these 13 reprints from 1978 to 2000, Nudger (Oops!, 1998, etc.), in the best shamus tradition, rarely begins with a murder case, though most of his investigations lead to murder sooner or later. Instead, he tracks missing persons, looks for witnesses who can alibi or exculpate his clients, checks out the credentials of people, like the young woman his smitten client's bus passes each morning in 'The Romantics', tries to figure out why a suicide he'd never seen before blamed his fatal plunge on 'Nudger in Before You Leap', or in perhaps the best and most characteristic of these stories, 'The Thunder of Guilt' - follows a client's wife whose suspicious behavior is covering something much worse than an affair. It would make sense, in fact, to think of colorless Nudger as everlastingly following equally colorless characters with an endless supply of guilty secrets. The variety of opening gambits is complemented by Lutz's trademark prose, flat and fluid as a slithering snake.
Author
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. John Lutz has captivated suspense enthusiasts for over four decades. He has been one of the premier voices in contemporary hard-boiled fiction. His work includes political suspense, private eye novels, urban suspense, humor, occult, crime caper, police procedural, espionage, historical, futuristic, amateur detective, thriller; virtually every mystery sub-genre. John Lutz published his first short story in 1966 in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and has been publishing regularly ever since. He is the author of more than fifty novels and 250 short stories and articles. His novels and short fiction have been translated into virtually every language and adapted for almost every medium. He is a past president of both Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America. Among his awards are the MWA Edgar, the PWA Shamus, The Trophee 813 Award for best mystery short story collection translated into the French language, the PWA Life Achievement Award, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society's Golden Derringer Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the author of two private eye series, the Nudger series, set in his home town of St. Louis, and the Carver series, set in Florida, as well as many non-series suspense novels. His SWF SEEKS SAME was made into the hit movie SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and his novel THE EX was made into the HBO original movie of the same title, for which he co-authored the screenplay. Lutz and his wife, Barbara, split their time between St. Louis and Sarasota, Florida.
