Welcome to the site dedicated to the New Orleans Mystery series written by my late husband and myself. These books have not been available to the public (except through used book stores in expensive out of print hard cover versions). With the help (actually he did most of the work) of my son Robert Corrington, all five books in the series are now available as Kindle e-books on Amazon. Naturally I am very excited about this development, and have been announcing it to all my friends. This web site is to announce it to all of you who don’t know me, but appreciate good action/adventure mysteries, with bold, fun characters, who live in that historic but crime-ridden city, New Orleans — “the city that care forgot” or as the beleaguered natives sometimes say, “the city that forgot to care.”
Three characters continue throughout the series, though the point of view changes from book to book:
Wes Colvin is narrator of So Small a Carnival and Fear of Dying. He is my late husband’s alter ego (it’s no accident that John Wesley Colvin has the same initials as John William Corrington, and is a redneck from Shreveport, who hates the corruption of New Orleans). Wes is a reporter for the New Orleans Item (a fictional newspaper, let me hasten to say), but is anxious to move on to bigger and better things. But he finds himself deeply attracted to a local girl from a prominent old New Orleans family, whose roots run so deep it’s unlikely she will ever leave.
Denise Lemoyne, Wes’s girlfriend, is the narrator of A Civil Death. She is not my alter ego (I’m a middle-class Texan, not a New Orleans socialite, but we did raise our family in one of those huge old Uptown houses so I know the scene well). Despite her background, I insisted Denise not be “girly,” and her character was written to be smart, bold, and sexy, while still concerned with the social norms she was raised to follow.
Ralph “Rat” Trapp, a NOPD Captain of Homicide, is the narrator of A Project Named Desire and The White Zone. He is modeled on a friend of ours who was, like Rat, an army veteran, but who returned to his home town to become the director of the Desire project rather than a cop like Rat. Rat and Wes are best friends since they share an equal contempt for “rules.” Rat treats New Orleans (and Hollywood when he visits there) like a combat zone, where anything goes.
If you are interested in how this series began, it was like this: My husband said he would like to write an “entertainment,” a mystery story, and had in mind a first scene: a man walks into a bar and finds everyone there has been murdered. But he did not have a plot. I was the story teller in our writing team, so I said to let me think about it. After a time I came back and said, “It was because of Huey Long’s assassination in the 1930s…” The resulting novel became So Small a Carnival. It sold readily to Viking Press, and it was subsequently translated and reprinted in six foreign editions. Thus, we decided to continue with the series. If you read them all, you will discover that the underlying motive in all five books is something from the past. As Faulkner noted: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”