Please Welcome Mystery Author Joan Del Monte

with Joan Del Monte

We are delighted to welcome mystery author Joan Del Monte to Omnimystery News.

Joan's fourth novel is Murder Redrum (February 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats) and today she tells us about the time period of the storyline, 1923.

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Photo provided courtesy of
Joan Del Monte

Well, so I've been learning about 1923.

Did you know men's pants did not have zippers on their flies in 1923? Zippers were just appearing. The cutting edge crowd had them; young and fashionable men. But they were in the minority.

Real men, by God, wore buttons!

When I decided to set my fourth mystery, Murder Redrum, in 1923, I knew I'd have to make changes from modern life. No computers, cell phones, TV, and a population staggered by the deadliest flu the word has known. From spring 1918 into l9l9 the Spanish flu pandemic killed over 50 million people worldwide. The American government insisted on trying to keep up public morale, so it kept releasing statements that the flu was over. But the flu came in three waves, the third being the most deadly.

The poor, left to their own solutions, had all kinds of ways to protect themselves. Word spread that the only cure was garlic worn in a linen bag around the neck. Or sugar cubes soaked in turpentine. To walk into a New York tenement was to be knocked back three feet by the reek.

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Joan Del Monte has taught courses in antiques at UCLA extension and the California State College system; lectured on antiques on radio and wrote a bibliography of small antiques for the Los Angeles Public Library.

Joan has also taught a course in writing the mystery novel at Santa Monica College, which she called "A Guide to the Pitfalls, From Someone Who Has Fallen Into Most of Them". She has a B.S. from Columbia University and an M.A. from U.C.L.A. She is a frequent public speaker on her books and the writer’s life.

For more information about the author, please visit her website at JoanDelMonte.com or find her on Facebook.

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Murder Redrum
Joan Del Monte
A Palindrome Mystery

High in his outrageous apartment over a brewery, a stock market genius plots four simultaneous bank robberies at one intersection. The police receive four alarms and ignore them thinking it has to be an error. The genius codes his plans with palindromes to hide them.

In 1923, the abrasive dry laws only add more confusion to an already addled, overworked police department riven with the politically ambitious and inept criminal investigation department. Consequently, the solution of the crimes falls to a retired forensics cop, who is now a Chinese restaurant chef, and his protégé, who has family problems of his own with the dry laws. The robbers’ escape seems inconceivable plus they have hostages. Only one thing is for sure: They aren’t stopping for anything.