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 in Los Angeles, 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 in “The Kerman Kill,” a short story included in the 1987 collection, Murder in Los Angeles, edited by Jon L. Breen, as well as new additions to the Callahan series, seemed to mark the return of a master after too long an absence. Too bad, then, that while the characters in the story were intriguing, the plot in this story itself wasn’t up to Gault’s best, and the prose lacked his usual zip.
Besides Apoyan, Gault was also responsible for several other interesting one-shot eyes, such as Sandy McKane and Mortimer Jones.
SHORT STORIES
- “The Kerman Kill” (1987, Murder in Los Angeles; also 1993, New Mystery v. 1, #3)
