Novel set in World War II-era Buffalo defies conventions

By P.A. Kane

The latest literary offering from Stephen G. Eoannou, After Pearl, due May 1, 2025, is the first novel in the Nicholas Bishop Mystery Series. Eoannou is also the author of the excellent short story collection Muscle Cars and two historical fiction books, Yesteryear and Rook.

After Pearl is a noir novel set in 1942 Buffalo amid World War II. The story follows Nicholas Bishop, a private investigator with an unhealthy taste for Three Roses bourbon, who wakes up on a hotel room floor after a bender with two bullets missing from his .38 revolver, a one-eyed dog and no memory of the past five days. Police suspect him in the disappearance and possible murder of night club singer, Pearl DuGaye.

After Pearl is replete with all the smokey gray elements of a noir tale. However, the novel is colored by more than the days Bishop lost on his bender and clearing his name. With sharp, witty dialogue and intriguing characters like Fat Ira and the steadfast Gia Alessi, it delves into societal norms, cultural expectations and a man trying to make sense of his past, his struggle to walk a straighter line and his quest to find his place in a complicated world.

We talked to Stephen Eoannou about After Pearl, writing, his inspirations for characters and what’s next for him.

PAK: What was your path to writing and then publishing? Along the way, what was the thing that benefited your work the most, and what is a do-over you’d like to have?

SGE: It was a long, long path! I knew I wanted to be a writer in high school after I read John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire. I loved how Irving made me laugh until I realized how sad it was. That realization, that emotional gut punch, would stop me midsentence. I knew I wanted to do that, to make readers feel.

I didn’t get serious about writing until my sophomore year in college. Of course, I didn’t tell anybody. The chances of getting published were slim, so I kept it to myself and never mentioned my dream except to girls I was trying to impress.

When I was in my mid-twenties working on my MA at Miami University, all these American male authors under 30 were making their debuts. Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Lott, Michael Chabon, Jay McInerney. I thought I’d be like those guys.

But my thirties came and went. So did my forties. My short story collection Muscle Cars was finally published when I turned 52. I wasn’t quite the overnight sensation I thought I’d be.

The game changer was I went back to school and earned my MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. You don’t need an MFA to be a writer, but what I truly believe you do need is a support group. One you can share work with and support each other emotionally and creatively.

I never had that before I went to Queens. I tried various writing groups over the years, but I could never find one where the members were as serious as I was about writing, who put in the damn work like I did. Eventually, I gave up trying and just wrote in isolation. I think that was a huge detriment to my development.

My big do-over would be to find that group much earlier in life, say by a couple decades! Getting honest feedback on your work delivered with love and compassion is invaluable for an emerging writer trying to find their way. It took me longer than it should’ve to realize that.

PAK: Is there a specific inspiration for Nicholas Bishop? Maybe someone you know or an extension of someone from a Raymond Chandler novel or some other fictional work? And Bishop’s sidekick, Gia — I defy anybody who reads this book to not crush on the ethereal Gia, with her stinging comebacks and fresh Ivory soap scent. Does she have a doppelganger?

SGE: I was sipping bourbon alone at a bar on Rhode Island Street when I got the idea for Bishop. I was thinking about the PI movie I’d watched the night before and the tropes of classic noir detectives — having a moral code higher than the corrupt police or courts, the lack of consequences if the private eye drank a quart of bourbon or got cracked over the head with it, women falling at his feet, being the toughest guy in the room and so on.

What if I created a character who was the opposite of those things but placed him in that same noir world? What would that be like? Then I remembered a guy I hadn’t thought of in 30 years, Mickey The Bug. He was a friend of my mom’s growing up. He was kind of a shady guy, a gambler, I think.

During World War II, he was in San Francisco waiting to be shipped out to the Pacific when he got drunk and was hit by a cab. His injuries were so severe that he was never deployed. Uncle Sam sent him home on a medical discharge. My mom was convinced Mick stepped in front of that taxi on purpose to keep from going overseas.

Norman Mailer said that writing is a spooky art because you get these ideas out of nowhere. Why did I remember Mickey at that moment sitting at that bar? I could barely remember what he looked like, but he showed up when I needed him. That memory of Mick and the taxi got the wheels turning.

What if my detective was an alcoholic and I could portray his alcoholism realistically with consequences? What if he didn’t remember what happened that night with the cab because he was too drunk? What if that accident, if it was an accident, left him physically and emotionally handicapped? What if he was no lady’s man? And what if he barely had a moral compass and everybody called him a weasel? Mickey The Bug became Nicky The Weasel that night over a couple glasses of Four Roses.

Now the idea for Gia came from criticism that there wasn’t a strong female character in my second novel, Yesteryear. I thought, all right, I’ll show you. I’ll give you a tough Lower West Side Italian girl, a feminist about 30 years ahead of her time.

She doesn’t want to be Bishop’s secretary or assistant. She wants to be a private eye, a pretty rare thing for a woman in 1942. I’ll make her the one with the moral code and itchy trigger finger. She’ll be the one who doesn’t take crap from anybody, especially men. In many ways, she’s already the better detective than Bishop even though she’s just starting out.

Both characters were great fun to write. And I agree with you, it’s impossible not to love Gia. I might be biased, however.

Except for your short story collection Muscle Cars, your other books, Yesteryear and Rook, are historical fiction, and After Pearl is set during World War II. How do you balance historical accuracy with narrative freedom? Can you provide an example of a time when you chose fiction over history or vice versa?

SGE: I try to be as historically accurate as possible. Yesteryear required the most research. That novel centers on Fran Striker, the man who created and wrote The Lone Ranger … and sold The Ranger’s rights away for 10 bucks.

I had to research Striker’s life, the early days of radio, The Great Depression, and, of course, The Lone Ranger. I tried very hard to get it right, but that novel contains the largest historical inaccuracy in all my writing … and I knew it was inaccurate when I wrote it.

In Yesteryear, Striker suffers from writer’s block. This is as far from the truth as I could’ve possibly gotten. Striker never had a minute’s worth of writer’s block in his life. He was a workaholic. In 1934, Douglas Ripley (of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not fame) estimated that Striker wrote about 70,000 words per week! That’s the equivalent of writing a short novel every seven days.

But my fictionalized Striker was creatively blocked because I was drawn to exploring the sources of stories and inspiration for a writer. Where do they come from? How did Striker come up with The Lone Ranger?

I think story and character ideas are all around us. We just need to be open and receptive to all these signals the universe sends. More importantly, we must believe those signals will be sent and they will reach us. Writing, in many ways, is a leap of faith.

I have to believe the ideas and inspiration will be there when I need it, just like I needed a main character and was struck by the memory of Mickey The Bug getting run over by a taxi. Like Mailer said, writing’s a spooky art. I don’t pretend to understand it even after all these decades of trying.

PAK: The dialogue in After Pearl has a thousand great, sarcastic one-liners, especially between the main characters, Bishop, and his assistant, Gia. The flow is easy and often very funny. Did that happen organically, or did you have to work at it because it appears seamless, like these people just fit together?

SGE: Even though it took me 30 years to get published, I was always pretty good at dialogue, even during those dark, unpublished years. With Bishop and Gia, their dialogue just unfolded naturally.

I usually write very slowly, speaking each word aloud, going over and over every sentence until I feel it’s good enough to move on to the next. Not so with dialogue. I write that very fast with no attribution or physical description. The characters take over and I just try to keep up.

I’ll go back afterwards to clean and tighten things so it’s rapid fire like in the classic noir tradition. Infusing humor in the dialogue was important to me, especially when it came to Bishop’s character. He’s unlikable in so many ways, but humor makes him likable, more accessible, I hope. And he uses humor not just to be liked but also to shield and deflect, to protect himself.

With Gia, I wanted her humor to reflect her brashness, that she can give and take as well as any man. She’s not afraid to speak her mind or toss a few barbs. Nazis don’t even scare her. She’s a funny, tough cookie.

PAK: Your main character, Nichloas Bishop, has compassion for people on the margins of society —Benny the Junkman, who has PTSD from his time in Argonne in WWI, and the Jewish lawyer Fat Ira. Why was it important to portray him that way?

SGE: Because Bishop is one of them, out there in the margins. At the start of the novel, he’s lost everything: his office, secretary, apartment, money, sobriety. Hell, he can’t even find his car. He has no friends, except Ira, Benny and a one-eyed, female dog named Jake. He’s often more concerned about their well-being than his own.

Bishop doesn’t have much of a moral code, but his love and loyalty to his friends makes up a big part of what he does have. Also, showing this compassion helps, like humor does, to make an unlikable character a bit more accessible to readers. And let’s face it, Nicky The Weasel needs all the help he can get!

PAK: As much as After Pearl is a murky gray bourbon-infused noir mystery, I also see it as a story of grief. Am I right about that?  

SGE: Absolutely. Often in classic noir there are no psychological or physical consequences to the main character’s actions or what happens to him. This always bothered me.

There will be consequences if you drink a bottle of bourbon. There will be physical consequences if you’re drugged, shot, beat up or cracked over the head with a two-by-four.

I wanted to show that with Bishop. His grief is part of the consequences of having a mother who abandoned him, of a mentor who deserted him, of his mortification at learning about his drunken behavior. Much of Bishop’s life is filled with grief and remorse. Yet he’s trying to stay sober. He’s trying to be a good detective. He’s trying to be a man deserving of Gia. Bishop’s battling a lot more demons than just bourbon in After Pearl, even though that’s the most obvious one. 

PAK: The names of the characters in the book — Joey Bones, Phil Amigone and my favorite, Charlie Rainbow, are hard-boiled noir-type of names, but so great. Do you catalog names or make them up as you go?

SGE: I love names and nicknames. That’s what great about writing historical crime fiction. The genre demands interesting nicknames for gangsters, lounge singers and prizefighters. I can invent or steal funny, quirky names and they seem to fit in the milieu I’m creating. Buffalo is an ethnic city populated with rich, diverse people. Living here makes my job of naming characters easy.

If I come across a unique or funny sounding name in the newspaper or on the local news, I’ll jot it down. For instance, there’s a local roofer in town, Moses Turkovich. I see his trucks and ads everywhere. You don’t think I’m stealing that name? A character like that will break your thumbs if you owe him money.

Often, I’ll dig out my high school yearbook and flip through it if I need a Polish, Irish or an Italian last name. That’s one of the benefits of having gone to a large, public school. Gia’s a good example of this. She needed an Italian surname. I paged through my yearbook, and I graduated with a girl with the last name Alessi. Gia Alessi sounded right.

The lounge singer Pearl DuGaye was named after another girl I went to high school with, Jenelle DuGaye, who’s a phenomenal singer in her own right.

Naming Bishop was different, however. I was thinking specifically of Billy Chapel, the main character in Michael Shaara’s wonderful novel For The Love of the Game. Billy, like Bishop, is a character filled with internal struggle and turmoil. I also liked the religious connotations of Chapel and Bishop. Maybe there’s something good and redeeming about characters with names like that, something holy at their core. And, of course, the nickname Nicky The Weasel was inspired by my mom’s childhood friend, Mickey The Bug.

PAK: Besides the necessity of establishing a routine and writing every day, what other advice would you have for aspiring writers?

SGE: Fred Leebron is the head of the MFA program at the Queens University of Charlotte. Fred used to say, “Writing is a game of attrition. Don’t attrite.” It took me a long time to get here, a long time watching other people get published ahead of me. But I didn’t quit. I didn’t attrite. I kept working at my craft, trying to get better. I kept sending work out and collecting rejection slips.

But I didn’t give up. You never know when that short story, or poem, or manuscript will fall on the right editor’s desk at the right moment. That chance is taken away if you quit writing or quit submitting. I know all the excuses for quitting. I’ve told myself all of them over the years.

“Writing’s hard work.” Hell, yeah it is, but don’t attrite. “No one cares.” You’re right. No one does, except you. Don’t attrite. “I feel like a failure.” You’re not a failure. You’re just not a success yet. Don’t attrite. You’ll never hit a pitch if you don’t swing, so swing away. Swing for the goddamn fences. “But I might miss.” So what? Choke up and take another cut at it. Just don’t attrite.

PAK: I read that “Slip Kid,” a story from your Muscle Cars collection, may be in development for the stage. Where is that at, and what are you working on now?

SGE: “Slip Kid” has had an interesting life. It started out as novel called A Quiet Prayer. It was a miserable failure of a novel that I spent over 10 years trying to write. The story was based on true events, the murder of my parish priest when I was 16.

I abandoned that novel, but the story wouldn’t abandon me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I rewrote it as a short story retitled “Slip Kid” after that great Who song. It became the centerpiece to my short story collection, Muscle Cars.

But those characters in “Slip Kid” still wouldn’t leave me alone. I decided to adapt “Slip Kid” into a screenplay just to see if I could write one. I couldn’t get a feature out of it, but it did win the best short screenplay award at the Denver Film Festival. Developing it for the screen never got past the talking stage, however. That manuscript’s sitting in some drawer or on some hard drive, maybe even on a floppy disc.

What I’m working on now is editing The Falling Woman, the second in the Nicholas Bishop mystery series. I just signed the contract with SFWP, and it has a pub date of Spring 2027. Bishop and Gia are, of course, back and I’ve tried to develop other characters who were secondary in After Pearl or maybe mentioned only in passing — Joey Bones, Lucky Teddy Thurston, even Bishop’s estranged mother. I enjoyed spending more time with Bishop and living in his bourbon hazy, hardboiled world. I hope readers will, too.