For many writers, having one book published is a big accomplishment. For one member of the Southeastern community, getting one book published is business as usual.

O’Neil De Noux, an investigator with the University Police Department, had five books published between June and August of this year.

These books add to his already substantial publishing credits, which include six short-story collections, seven novels and over 200 short stories. His works, including four of the five recently published, reflect De Noux’s New Orleanian and investigative background.

“New Orleans Mysteries” is a collection of 10 mystery stories set in New Orleans from 1891 to the 2027. “New Orleans Nocturnal” is a set of nine short stories featuring fictional New Orleans Police Homicide Detective John Raven Beau.

“Slick Time” is a caper novel that involves a kidnapping, an extortion, the filming of a sexy movie, a savvy NOPD detective and a private eye known as the most dangerous man in New Orleans. “Mafia Aphrodite” is an erotic thriller about a crime family heiress bringing her sexual fantasies to life by using her wealth and status.

“A Short Guide to Writing and Selling Fiction” details various aspects of writing a novel in addition to giving information of how to get a book published.

With the majority of his novels being crime fiction, De Noux explained how his work as an investigator influences his writing.

“Some of the incidents in ‘New Orleans Mysteries’ and ‘New Orleans Nocturnal’ are fairly similar to things that I have experienced,” said De Noux. “However, since it’s fiction, I was able to embellish certain things.”

De Noux said that he has been writing short stories since his days at Rummel High School in New Orleans.

“I first started writing short stories in high school,” said De Noux. “However, I wrote a lot of bad short stories. Ray Bradbury said, ‘Every writer has 100,000 bad words, and you get them out the way,’ and apparently I did that.”

In addition to writing the works, De Noux shot the pictures for all of the covers except for “Mafia Aphrodite.”

“All of the shoots were a little bit of a challenge, but I’ve been doing photography for a long time, so I would say it was fun,” said De Noux, who was a trained combat photographer during the Vietnam War.

For two of the shoots, De Noux said he used two people close to him.

“The person that appears on the cover of ‘Slick Time’ is my wife,” said De Noux. “On the cover of ‘New Orleans Nocturnal’ is my partner at the police department, and we shot that one here on Southeastern’s campus.”

De Noux received an Artist Services Career Advancement Award last September from the Louisiana Division of the Arts to aid him in writing his next novel.

According to De Noux, the grant was extremely helpful.

“The grant was specifically for a book I’ve been writing over the past two years,” said De Noux. “The book is called ‘Battle Kiss,’ which is about the Battle of New Orleans. It took a lot of research, and that money was used for research and writing it.”

De Noux is currently working on a        private eye novel set in 1950 New Orleans and features one of his re-occurring characters, Lucien Caye.