JOHN LUTZ “What You Don’t Know Can Harm You.” Alo Nudger. First appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Thriller Journal, November 1982. PWA Winner for Greatest Brief Story. Collected in The Nudger Dilemmas (5 Star, 2001). Reprinted in The Shamus Winners, Quantity I: 1982-1995, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Excellent Crime Books, 2010).
Alo Nudger is the St. Louis-based PI with the nervous abdomen who appeared in ten novels and 9 or extra quick tales, of which that is the fourth. One theme in all of his appearances is his fixed use of antacids at any time when the going will get robust, however you must also know that at any time when that occurs — and it at all times does — he by no means falters or turns apart. He at all times carries via, irrespective of how robust the going will get.
On this quick story he awakens on the ground of his workplace after having been visited by a few goons who had labored him over, adopted by a feminine nurse, linebacker-sized, who, when his solutions show unsatisfactory, doses him with reality serum.
Irrespective of. He didn’t reveal something about his shoppers, as a result of not one of the circumstances he’s engaged on are value that type of questioning.
It’s a thriller, however after a go to to the doughnut store downstairs beneath his workplace, he begins to have a glimmer of what’s happening. I may inform you extra, however I’m reluctant to, as a result of that’s actually all of the story’s about: his studying what it’s that’s happening in addition to serving to out a pal who wants assist.
In some ways this in solely a minor story in Alo Nudger’s profession, however in different methods, you’ll be able to consider it as one which tells you what sort of man he’s.
