Born in New Orleans, O’Neil De Noux is a former homicide detective and organized-crime investigator. He has also worked as a private investigator, U.S. Army combat photographer, criminal intelligence analyst, journalist, magazine editor, and computer graphics designer. As a police officer, De Noux received seven commendations for solving difficult murder cases. In 1981 he was named Homicide Detective of the Year for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office. In 1989 he was proclaimed an expert witness on the homicide crime scene by the Criminal District Court in New Orleans.
Mr. De Noux’s published novels include Grim Reaper, The Big Kiss, Blue Orleans, Crescent City Kills, The Big Show and Hollow Point / The Mystery of Rochelle Marais.
O’Neil De Noux has also had over 150 short stories published in the United States, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy, Scotland, and Sweden. He teaches mystery writing at the University of New Orleans. He is the founding editor of two fiction magazines, Mystery Street and New Orleans Stories.
The inspiration for “Death on Denial” came when my wife, Debra Gray De Noux (editor of Erotic New Orleans anthology), peeked into the living room and said, “Are you watching Death on the Nile again?” It occurred to me that a play on words was called for. So I came up with a title first, which I’ve done often, then filled in the blanks, including a character who likes to watch Death on the Nile over and over again.
Pete Dexter lives on an island in Puget Sound with his dogs, Pansy and Fred, and his wife, Dian. He has just finished his sixth novel, Train. The Dexters have a daughter, Casey, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with a kid named Tate, and they have a cat named George, who is originally from Tucson. Due to bad behavior, he is not let out of the house (George, not Mr. Dexter).
“The Jeweler” was the first few pages of a novel, something I wrote to help myself make sense of a character. I was cutting it out of the manuscript later, which is what always happens in this kind of deal, when my brother Tom — who lives in Montana with his wife Jane and his daughters Molly, Annie, and the beautiful but eerie identical twins Phoebie and Elizabeth, and their dog, Gretta — when Tom called out of the clear, blue, Montana sky and said he thought I ought to write some short stories. So instead of throwing the pages away I sent them to my agent, Esther Newberg, who would like to have a dog but is allergic and has a cat instead, who obeys her instantly. But then, don’t we all?
A Southern California native, Tyler Dilts received his M.F.A. in fiction from California State University, Long Beach, where he now teaches writing in the English and Theater Arts Departments. He is a winner of the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Award, and his short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals, including RipRap, The Circle, and Puerto Del Sol. He recently completed his first novel, A King of Infinite Space, and is currently hard at work on his second, in which the nameless narrator of ‘Thug: Signification and the (De) Construction of Self’ makes a return appearance.
The protagonist of “Thug” is a character who circled around the edges of my writing consciousness for quite a while before finally finding his place. I had tried using him in a number of different ways, first as a supporting character in other people’s stories, then in his own. He never really seemed to fit, though. I just couldn’t find the right voice, the right tone, to give him his due. But he was always there, waiting patiently for his chance. I’d almost given up on him, when, during a particularly busy month in graduate school, in the course of which I found myself reading a profoundly odd juxtaposition of works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and a half-dozen or so postmodern literary theorists (the two new Jacques — Derrida and Lacan, and the rest of their gang), he bubbled back up to the surface of my awareness and asserted himself. Sitting down to write a critical essay on deconstruction for one of my classes, something else entirely emerged — the first lines of this story.
Mike Doogan is a third-generation Alaskan who lives in Anchorage with his wife of thirty-two years, Kathy. He writes a metro column for the Anchorage Daily News. He has won several journalism awards and shared in the newspaper’s 1989 Pulitzer Prize. Doogan is the author of two books of nonsense about Alaska and the editor of a collection of essays about living in the far north. ‘War Can Be Murder’ is his first mystery story.
I’ve been a Dashiell Hammett fan for as long as I can remember, and at one time did quite a bit of research into his service in Alaska with the U.S. Army during World War II. When Anchorage mystery writer Dana Stabenow asked me to write a story for her anthology The Mysterious North, which grew immediately out of the Left Coast Crime Conference, I thought immediately of Hammett.
Fortunately, my research had been summarized in an article for the Armchair Detective (“Dash-ing Through the Snow,” Winter 1989), so the material was readily to hand. The story that resulted is an amalgam of fact and fiction. The Hammett character is as true to life as I could make him, as is World War II Anchorage. The rest of it I made up.
I also did my best to be true to Hammett’s writing style and the ethos of his work. I am satisfied with the result, keeping in mind that he was Dashiell Hammett and I’m only me.
Brendan DuBois is the award-winning author of short stories and novels. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, and numerous other anthologies. He has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for his short fiction and has been nominated three times for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. This is his fourth appearance in the yearly Houghton Mifflin Best American Mystery Stories series edited by Otto Penzler; one of his short stories was also included in the Best American Mystery Stories of the Twentieth Century.
He’s also the author of the Lewis Cole mystery series — Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, and Killer Waves. His novel Resurrection Day, a suspense thriller that looked at what might have happened had the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 erupted into a nuclear war, received the Sidewise Award in 2000 for best alternative history novel, and it has been published in seven other countries.
His latest novel, a suspense thriller called Betrayed, was published this year in both the United States and Great Britain. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with his wife, Mona, where he is at work on a new novel. Please visit his new Web site, www.brendandubois.com.