A REVIEW BY FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR.         


JOHN LUTZ – Tropical Heat.

Henry Holt & Co., hardcover, 1986; paperback reprint: Avon, 1987.

   The setting is central Florida and the private detective is Fred Carver, a fortyish balding ex-cop whose police career abruptly ended when he was kneecapped by a Latino street punk.

JOHN LUTZ Tropical Heat

   A new protagonist and a new scene, but the world caught on the pages of Tropical Heat is unmistakably the world of John Lutz, the St. Louis area’s foremost suspense novelist, and the superficially tough and cynical Carver clearly belongs in the post-Ross Macdonald fraternity (or is the word siblinghood?) of concerned and compassionate PIs, right alongside Lutz’s earlier detective character, the timid and soft-hearted Alo Nudger.

   Vegetating in the beachfront bungalow he bought with his disability pay, Carver is visited by upscale real-estate salesperson Edwina Talbot and in effect challenged to stop pitying himself and do something with the rest of his life.

   The particular something she wants him to do is to find her lover, Willis Davis, who in the middle of a solitary continental breakfast on her terrace either walked out on her for no reason, or jumped off a cliff into the ocean, or was pushed off.

   The search leads Carver to a condominium time-sharing scam, a drug deal (in Florida, what else?), an assortment of close calls, and an emotional entanglement with his lovely and much-abused client which neither he nor she is well equipped to handle.

   The plot of Tropical Heat is the bare-bones variety, but the meat on those bones is prime Florida noir. Lutz does a blazingly vivid job not only with the sun-soaked atmosphere and the wild action scenes (including Carver’s underwater duel with a Marielito knife killer and an airboat chase through the midnight Everglades) but also with the anguished relationship of a man and a woman each struggling against a personal darkness.

   This novel makes great summer reading — provided the reading is done in an air-conditioned room to counteract Lutz’s descriptions of the oppressive Florida heat.

– Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 9, No. 2, March/April 1987.



FRED CARVER. Private eye series character created by John Lutz. For a complete profile of Fred Carver, check out his page on the Thrilling Detective website. The following complete list of recorded cases is expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

      Tropical Heat. Holt 1986; Avon 1987.
      Scorcher. Holt 1987; Avon 1988.

JOHN LUTZ Tropical Heat

      Kiss. Holt 1988; Avon 1990.
      Flame. Holt 1990; Avon 1991.
      Blood Fire. Holt 1991; Avon 1992.
      Hot. Holt 1992; Avon 1993.

JOHN LUTZ Tropical Heat

      Spark. Holt 1993; no ppbk edition.
      Torch. Holt 1994; no ppbk edition.
      Burn. Holt 1995; no ppbk edition.

JOHN LUTZ Tropical Heat

      Lightning. Holt 1996; no ppbk edition.

Short stories —

       “Someone Else” (Justice for Hire, 1990)
       “Night Crawlers” ( EQMM, April 1997)