After Pearl by Stephen G. Eoannou
Author Guest Post + Book & Author Info
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After Pearl
“After Pearl is a wonderfully rendered hard-boiled historical mystery reminiscent of Chandler’s Marlowe novels.”
— Bruce Robert Coffin, International Bestselling author of The Turner and Mosley Files
From award-winning author Stephen G. Eoannou, After Pearl will take you back in time…
1942. War rages in Europe. Pearl Harbor still smolders. And alcoholic private eye Nicholas Bishop wakes up on a hotel room floor with two slugs missing from his .38 revolver. The cops think he’ s murdered lounge singer Pearl DuGaye, mobsters think he saw something he shouldn’ t have, and Bishop remembers nothing…
Together with his indomitable assistant Gia Alessi, who he may or may not have fired, a WWI vet who often flashes back to 1918, and a one-eyed female dog named Jake, Bishop tries to piece together the events that took place during his disastrous five-day bender. Along the way, he stumbles across a dirty politician, a socialite and her unfaithful husband, and a cabal of American Nazis who are undoubtedly up to no good. Written in the spirit of classic noir, Eoannou adds his own unique voice and flair to the genre in this, the first action-packed outing of the Nicholas Bishop Mysteries.
“Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett would be proud of this next generation author who takes their styles and not only matches them but adds his own unique flair and voice to the genre. This is a novel dying to be made into a movie.” —Historical Fiction Company 5 Star Review
To purchase After Pearl, click any of the following links: Amazon, Barnes and Noble & Bookshop.org
After Pearl Guest Post
My Father’s Stories
by Stephen G. Eoannou
My father was a great storyteller. Especially if he’d had a few drinks and my mother wasn’t around. I loved hearing his memories from the 1930’s and ‘40s of growing up in Buffalo, New York’s Genesee and Oak Street area. This neighborhood was populated with recent Greek immigrants like my grandparents and father. The Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church on Oak Street was the center of the Greek community then, but it was my grandfather’s restaurant, The New Genesee, that was the center of most of my dad’s tales.
I’d sit mesmerized as he reminisced about the regulars who came into the restaurant: his friend Lefty the Dog Thief, the junkman who was stabbed by another Greek (“He didn’t have to kill that poor old junkman.”), or the alcoholic boxer who’d ask my father to hold his diamond pinky ring before he went on a bender. He was afraid of losing or pawning it and said my dad was the only one he trusted to hold onto his diamond. I heard stories of how a drunken Jimmy Slattery, the former light heavyweight champion from South Buffalo, would come in and bother the waitresses. My father would threaten to throw him out (“Angelo, you can’t throw him out. He’s the champ!”).
Many of these stories made it into my novel Yesteryear. It was tremendous fun incorporating them and fleshing out Dad’s friends into fictional characters. It was a way of keeping my father’s stories alive and his memory fresh. I think he would’ve gotten a kick out of reading them in print.
Yesteryear wasn’t the first time I intertwined Dad’s stories with my own. My debut novel Rook is based on the true story of Buffalo bank robber Al Nussbaum. Rook alternates points-of-view between Al and his life on the run, and Lolly, his wife left behind who was trying to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. It’s as much a story about the end of a marriage as it is about a fugitive bank robber. One of the challenges Lolly faced was unemployment. Set in the early 1960’s, no one would hire “the bank robber’s wife” in Rook except Angelo at The New Genesee.
In real life, my grandfather had passed away in 1957 and my dad and uncle took over the restaurant. They sold it soon after. I was born in 1963 and never met my grandfather or set foot in his restaurant that I romanticized first in my imagination and later in my fiction. Still, writing about it seemed natural and right.
When I began planning my forthcoming novel After Pearl, a noir mystery set in 1942 Buffalo, I knew I wanted Bishop, my alcoholic main character, to be the house detective at The Lafayette Hotel. I love that old brick building with its long oak bar and iconic rooftop neon sign and wanted to write about it. I also loved the story my father told of how a man pulled a gun on him at the hotel bar one night after he’d returned from WWII. My parents were on a date and a man was bothering my mother. Dad, fresh from dashing across Europe with Patton, was having none of that. Thus, the gun.
My dad wasn’t packing, and the bouncers intervened before shots were fired. The cops were called. Everybody was kicked to the curb and told not to return. The Lafayette, a place where tempers flared and guns were drawn, seemed like the perfect setting for a detective novel.
The Lafayette is still in operation today and is close to where The New Genesee once stood. I liked the idea of Bishop being a regular at the restaurant. I could again write about a grandfather I never met and describe a restaurant I only knew from a few surviving photographs and my father’s enduring stories. I also liked the idea of how the restaurant and the neighborhood were becoming not only a running thread linking my novels, but an important part of the milieu in this fictionalized Buffalo I was creating.
I wanted the restaurant to be like Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca, a place filled with shady characters, where stolen items were bought and sold, where illegal poker games took place. I don’t think that’s too far from the truth based on my dad’s stories.
Dad’s been gone ten years now. I inherited from him a love of reading and storytelling. I said in a recent interview that the best stories I’ve written were stolen from him. That’s not quite true. I didn’t steal them. He gave them to me. Neither of us knew when he was telling and retelling his Genesee Street memories that they’d take root in my imagination, that I’d forever picture them as flickering black-and-white movies and feel a need to put them down on paper.
Over time, they became my memories. But memories are funny. They’re like ghosts. They visit when I least expect them. They don’t always show up like a moaning, chain-dragging Jacob Marley, however. Sometimes they come quietly, when the early-morning house is still, like a creeping muse bringing gifts from ninety years ago–gifts that had already been given to me.
After Pearl Author Stephen G. Eoannou
Stephen G. Eoannou is the author of the award-winning short story collection Muscle Cars and the novels After Pearl, Yesteryear, and Rook.
He holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and an MA from Miami University. He has been awarded an Honor Certificate from The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Best Short Screenplay Award at the 36th Denver Film Festival. His latest novel, Yesteryear, was awarded the 2021 International Eyelands Award for Best Historical Novel, The Firebird Book Award for Biographical Fiction, and Shelf Unbound’s Notable Indy Books of 2023.
He lives and writes in his hometown of Buffalo, New York, the setting and inspiration for much of his work.
To learn more about Stephen, click any of the following links: Website, Facebook & Twitter
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