Mon 30 Jul 2012
JOHN LUTZ – Diamond Eyes. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, December 1990. No paperback edition.
The dust jacket of this book describes it as “A novel of suspense featuring private investigator [Alo] Nudger.” Partly right. There is a lot of suspense, but most of that is due to the fact that Nudger doesn’t do any investigating.
In fact, I’m not sure I know what he does do, other than worry and sweat and lose his lunch as his client, his girl friend and his best friend are all either murdered, terrorized or brutalized by a pair of thugs who think Nudger knows the location of a slew of stolen diamonds.
He doesn’t, but that’s no excuse. The final straw comes when [Oops. PLOT ALERT] he simply leads the bad element straight to his dead client’s sister. He has successfully hidden her out for the second half of the book, but if I may quote from page 189: “He got in the Granada and aimed it north toward Hannibal, not noticing the drab gray rental car that followed.”
There is no other word to describe him. In this book Alo Nudger is incompetent. I’ve read a few of his cases before, and I’ve enjoyed them, but if I were to call this one disappointing, it would be an understatement.
PostScript: [Minor PLOT ALERT] I also didn’t care for the way Nudger’s client, female, was so brutally murdered. Calling it torture and rape doesn’t begin to describe it. What the author may have had in mind was showing how sadistically uncivil Nudger’s opponents are, but I (simple minded as I am) found it distasteful and disgusting.
Early on in the story a bomb on an airplane goes off, killing 93 people. For a PI story, I think this is overkill. I concede that it was a crucial part of the story the author was telling. You’ll have to convince me, though, that it was a story worth telling. It certainly wasn’t one I wanted to read.
February 1991 (slightly revised).
July 30th, 2012 at 9:54 pm
I don’t post here all of the reviews I’ve written in the past. Some of the ones you haven’t seen are of authors so little known and of so little interest that I find it easier to simply skip over them.
I also tend to omit reviews that are overly negative, not wishing to put them online for a wider audience when the possibility exists that if I were to read the book again, I might very well find myself disagreeing with myself.
So it took me a long time to post this review, which as you can see, is about as negative as I’ve ever gotten.
But it was my honest opinion then, and having read the review over several times, I’ve finally decided to let my younger self have the final word.
I did add that final sentence, though. Whatever the merits of the book are, it wasn’t at the time the book I either expected or wanted to read.
For what it’s worth, Kirkus gave it an excellent review, and Publisher’s Weekly a mixed one. Kevin Burton Smith says of the series: “Author John Lutz, displaying a very black sense of humour, seems to delight in tossing some very nasty plot twists in Alo’s path.”
https://www.thrillingdetective.com/nudger_a.html
So there you go.
July 30th, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Steve:
I haven’t read the book but the review was wonderful fun. Of course I never will look at Diamond Eyes, but I wasn’t anyhow. You however, are a great entertainer.
July 31st, 2012 at 6:54 am
Steve mentions that Alo Nudger is incompetent. He certainly is and I think that was definitely Lutz’s intention. I can’t find my copy of DIAMOND EYES but Nudger is not your usual private eye as shown by my notes from BUYER BEWARE:
1–His wife divorced him and she later is killed in a car accident, along with his two children.
2–Alo is not at all successful with women.
3–Alo was a failure as a cop. In fact he worked three years as a TV clown called “Mr Happy”.
4–His client gyps him out of most of the promised $50,000 fee.
5–But most unusual of all, he is easily scared, suffers from a nervous and upset stomach and is miserable.
In other words, Lutz set about to break many of the PI cliches and gave us a series hero that is really different.
July 31st, 2012 at 10:57 am
Barry
Glad you enjoyed the review. I’ve also been holding back on the next two from that same issue of the print version of Mystery*File where this one came from, also rather negative, and of some very popular authors.
One, in fact, got me into trouble with a number of his fans, who never forgot to needle me about it every so often. I don’t mean to be mysterious about it. It was Ross Thomas I’m talking about.
Reassured that I can still be entertaining even when I go negative, I’ll post the reviews, both of them, sometime soon.
— Steve
July 31st, 2012 at 11:06 am
Walker
I’m not positive, but I think that BUYER BEWARE was one of the Nudger books I’d read before DIAMOND EYES and enjoyed, at least in part because of all the flipping that John Lutz did of the usual PI cliches.
It’s been a while since I read the latter, but from my review, it’s clear that I thought he went overboard on both the violence (unnecessary?) and Nudger’s incompetency (laid on too heavy).
It would be interesting to read it again to see what I’d think about it now, and maybe I should, but all in all, the odds are that I probably won’t.
— Steve
July 31st, 2012 at 1:20 pm
Steve, I urge you to reread DIAMOND EYES, maybe while we are away at Pulpfest. I think it would make a great article for you to discuss the Steve Lewis of 20 years ago compared to the Steve of today, all seen through the plot of a private eye novel.
Now that would be a philosophical review!
July 31st, 2012 at 1:48 pm
Didn’t Mike Nevins write favorably about John Lutz at one time?
July 31st, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Walker
In honor of PulpFest I thought I might actually read a pulp magazine or two while everyone else is in Columbus, having fun without me.
July 31st, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Randy
You’re right. I also remember Mike reviewing several of John Lutz’s novels. As I recall, they appeared in the ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH first, and then he sent them on to various mystery fanzines, such as The MYSTERY FANcier.
And in fact, here’s one that I’ve reposted from there:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1188
The book is TROPICAL HEAT, and it’s one from Lutz’s other series, that of Florida PI Fred Carver.
July 31st, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Read the book, then DON’T hire Nudger !
The Doc