Pierre Apoyan
Created by William
Campbell Gault (1910-97)
Armenian-American PIERRE APOYAN is a former boxer making a career change. After slugging it out in sixteen amateur and two professional bouts as "Pistol Pete", and three years working for a large detective agency, he's decided to go out on his own, opening up a one-man agency over his uncle's rug shop in Beverly Hills. An interesting character, and the large, extended family is a nice change from all those lone wolf P.I.s who seem to have just sprouted from the earth, fully formed, without any human connections.
Author Gault, one of the last of the pulp writers, is best known for creating private eyes Brock Callahan and Joe Puma back in the fifties. The 1987 creation of Apoyan, as well as new additions to the Callahan series, seemed to mark the return of a master. Too bad, then, that the prose seemed so stilted.
As well as Callahan and Puma, Gault is also responsible for Sandy McKane.
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