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In1970, O’Neil De Noux was “drafted
into the U.S. Army for service in Vietnam. While awaiting shipment to Southeast Asia, angry at being a second-generation to
serve in Vietnam, De Noux was shocked when his shipment was cancelled as the gradual reduction in forces began. From California’s
Fort MacArthur, De Noux was stationed at the U.S. Army Aviation Center, Fort Rucker, AL. His army MOS was Photographer: Combat
Still. De Noux took run-of-the-mill army pictures while expressing himself creatively with black-and-white still-life photos,
winning several Best Photo Awards.
From 1977 to 1980, O’Neil
De Noux was a uniformed patrol officer for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, the most rewarding working experience
of his life. When promoted to the Homicide Division, De Noux found his calling and finally discovered what he should write
about. An exceptional career as a homicide detective followed in which De Noux solved every murder where he was lead investigator
(fifteen) and assisted in over fifty other homicide investigations. In 1980 De Noux completed the Homicide Investigation curriculum
at The Southern Police Institute of the University of Louisville.
Earning seven commendations,
O’Neil De Noux was named Homicide Detective of the Year in 1981. Shortly after, he was transferred from
Homicide, banished to a quiet police district when a new sheriff was elected. Offered a lucrative position as chief investigator
at a private investigative firm, De Noux worked as a P.I. for the next six years.”
After his home was seriously damaged
by Hurricane Katrina, O’Neil De Noux re-settled on the northshore of Lake Pontchartrain in 2006 and returned to law
enforcement. He is currently a Detective-Sergeant with the Louisiana Department of Public Safety working
with the Southeastern Louisiana University Police Department in Hammond, LA.
O’Neil De Noux is the author
of Blue Orleans, Grim Reaper, Specific Intent, Crescent City Kills, Lastanza: New Orleans Police Stories, The
Big Show, and New Orleans Confidential.
According to the book description of
Crescent City Kills, “When the bodies of two junkie prostitutes wash up on the shore of the
river in Algiers, La Stanza defies orders and hits the streets to investigate, using his sexy new partner as bait.”
One reader of Crescent
City Kills said, “This is the fourth book in a series about a New Orleans homicide detective named Dino
LaStanza, who is loosely based on the author, an ex-homicide cop himself. It's also my favorite of the series, although
I've bought and read them all. The books are definitely hardboiled, filled with all the warts and scabs of serious police
work. I've heard some people criticize the character of LaStanza's girlfriend, Lizette, as being unbelievable. Let
me tell you, she's a real person, though not so rich as in the books. There's a rumor that it's her legs that
grace the cover.”
Publisher’s Weekly said of Lastanza:
New Orleans Police Stories, “DeNoux's series character, New Orleans homicide detective Dino LaStanza,
is featured in a collection of gritty noir short stories. (The last novel in which LaStanza appeared was 1988's The Big
Show.) Like his protagonist, DeNoux has been a New Orleans police detective, and his years of grim experience in a city with
a soaring murder rate are reflected in these dark tales of life on the very mean streets. These stories are not only hardboiled:
they are raunchy, violent and filled with obscenities. Each short narrative follows one of LaStanza's cases. The tales
are unremittingly bleak: a beautiful young woman commits suicide; a jogger is attacked by a gang; an elderly woman is killed
by random gunfire. Unfortunately, DeNoux's prose is labored and stiff, his characters are cardboard and his plots are
thin and predictable. The best hard-boiled writing compresses powerful emotion into tight, minimalist prose. While these stories
display plenty of tough attitude, there's not a lot of feeling in De Noux's choppy sentences.”
One reader of Lastanza:
New Orleans Police Stories said, “I've been in love with O'Neil De Noux's books since I first
laid eyes on them many years ago. "Lastanza: New Orleans Police Stories" fills in some gaps in NOPD Homicide Detective
Dino Lastanza's career for those of us already familiar with him and gives readers who are new to him a wonderful insight
to his character. I've read all of De Noux's books many times over and I never tire of them. This is what homicide
is like in the real New Orleans!”
According to the book description of
New Orleans Confidential, “Come prowl the lonely, sometimes violent streets of America's
most exotic city, the city that care forgot, New Orleans, with a lone-wolf private eye named Lucien Caye. Caye lives and works
in the run-down New Orleans French Quarter of the late 1940s. Women float in and out of Caye's life, like the alluring
brunette who wants him to bodyguard her while she poses for sexy pictures. Murder is often the name of the game and Caye sometimes
leaves town for the gulf coast or the swamps of southern Louisiana in pursuit of the truth, usually aiding a pretty woman
in need of help, in more ways than one. Unfortunately, the truth is often ugly, often dangerous and usually resides on the
loneliest part of town.”
One reader of New
Orleans Confidential said, it “is a mix of noir mysteries and heart-wrenching tales with two common threads:
First, the stories are set in the late 1940s New Orleans (with realistic descriptions of that exotic city long before the
levees broke); Second is the leading character, Private Eye-Lucien Caye, a tough guy with a heart.
Caye, a WWII vet and former NOPD
cop, is now a PI, living and working in the shabby lower French Quarter after the war. He is different from the your typical
PI. He doesn't smoke, drinks only on occasion, rarely wears a hat because it messes up his hair and will bend (and sometimes
break) the law to mete out his own form of justice.
The cases come to him in classic
PI fashion - pretty damsels in distress, jealous spouses, dangerous femme fatales with murder and lust in their hearts, sexy
women with an eye for good looking men (like Caye) and precarious situations. The cases come with heartfelt appeal - a little
girl looking for her lost cat, a boy looking for his runaway father, a letter from a child asking Santa to take him to the
angels because his parents haven't enough food and daddy won't eat, giving his food to the boy and his mommie. Lucien
Caye attacks these cases with determination. There's even a ghostly trek into the swamps and a love sorceress. He won't
give up and you won't put this book down. While some of the stories are G-rated enough to have been
published in airline magazines, some are violent, profane and extremely erotic.
O'Neil De Noux's talent goes
beyond the penning of the stories. This reviewer has learned the photo which adorns the cover of the book was taken by De
Noux. It is the photo of the building on Barracks Street in New Orleans where Lucien Caye's office and apartment are located,
a building thankfully spared by Hurricane Katrina. It's a the corner of Barracks and Dauphine Streets.”
One reader said of Blue
Orleans, “Before Katrina tore up the levees and devastated New Orleans, it could have been called Blue
Orleans, especially in the Calliope Housing Project. Murder and mayhem were noticeably daily happenings. This day, when Dino
is called out to investigate a murder, he walked down Common Street wondering "where is everybody?" When he turned
on Baronne, he ran headlong with panicky people running here and yon in their quest for freedom. The 300 block of Baroone
looked like Mardi Gras. A huge crowd was massed all the way to Union Street on both sides of the street.
He sees an elderly lady about
80 years old dressed in her pink chiffon gown with a short fur coat draped over her feeble shoulders watching as another victim
of this hoodlum is at the door of the NOPSI building and another body hanging beneath the overhang of that same place. Usually,
most of the action takes place late at night or in the early hours while the painted ladies of the night ply their trade.
Dino seeks not to impinge on the territory of the gangs, as he wants to survive this day to find more bodies scattered around
this sinful town. In downtown area, a berserk gum is rampaging throughout shooting at random. Nobody is safe. One bound corpse
is discovered murdered execution-style, bullet to the brain.
He finds a witness who vanishes like
a puff of smoke, like Haslam tends to do when he wants to avoid the public. This writer also penned GRIM REAPER soon after
this one was published, and two short stories "Maria's Hand" and "Guilty of Dust and Sin." New Orleans
is the perfect place to find sin in all the different ganglands and projects. Nowadays, a good many of those are living on
the streets of Knoxville, which will soon become known as Sin City with all those liquor stores and drinkers swaying to and
fro on the main street of town. The place will be overrun with the homeless and this mayhew Dino is familiar in his hometown
will soon be in mine. It's a dirty shame for a rich mayor to allow the poor of New Orleans occupy and tear up the housing
while the poor of this town is denied even to apply for the same. Blue Orleans is not for the blues, which was developed in
Memphis. New Orleans is a jazz town, with some of the notables still hanging in and avoiding the water moccasins which have
taken over the deserted part of town.”
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