New Orleans Confidential

Lucien Caye Private Eye

by O'Neil De Noux

Come prowl the lonely, sometimes violent streets of American's most exotic city, the city that care forgot, New Orleans, with a lone-wolf private-eye named Lucien Caye.Unlike most Forties P.I.s, Caye rarely drinks, doesn't smoke or wear a hat (it messes up his hair). He's six feet tall with wavy, dark brown hair and standard-issue Mediterranean-brown eyes, a sly smile and a clever mind that often gets him into trouble. Caye lives and works in the run-down New Orleans French Quarter of the late 1940s.He has a weakness for women, children and fellow World War II veterans, down on their luck. He knows how to make a decent living but often finds himself working pro-bono - in one case working to find a little girl's missing cat, in another searching for a boy's runaway father and in yet another, canvassing the Quarter for the child who wrote a note to Santa Claus, asking Santa to take him to live with the angels so his mother and father didn't have to buy food for him anymore. They don't have any money.Murder is often the name of the game and Caye sometimes leaves town 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.This Second Edition includes two award winning stories. "The Heart Has Reasons" won the Private Eye Writers of America's prestigious SHAMUS AWARD for BEST SHORT STORY. The SHAMUS is given annually to recognize outstanding achievement in private eye fiction. The Short Mystery Fiction Society awarded the DERRINGER AWARD for BEST NOVELETTE to another Lucien Caye story, "Too Wise." The DERRINGER is given annually to recognize excellence in the mystery short form.Hope you enjoy this stroll along the wild side of New Orleans.

260 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 31, 2005

About the author

O'Neil Paul De Noux was born on 29 November 1950 in New Orleans.

Reviews

[John Brissette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of shorts.

This is a collection of short stories. That said it is a little tough to rate/review as it is technically several different pieces in one collection. The stores are entertaining, move well, and the characters are fun if at times predictable. Having family from Louisiana and being a frequent visitor to New Orleans which is a cultural second home, I bought this book because of the setting. Nola is a perfect setting, exotic, old, devil may care and Denoux does it very very well. Only criticisms are his tendency to get too far into the erotica end of the spectrum for my taste and that because this is a collection of shorts you end up reading the repetitive character development lines over and over again in each story so it gets a bit redundant that the main doesn't wear hats and why, that he served in Europe in the war and where, etc. otherwise it's completely entertaining which is the point of this genre.