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Whitfield, Raoul

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 7 months ago

Raoul Whitfield (1898-1945), who also wrote as Ramon Dacolta and Temple Field, was a successful writer of hard-boiled stories for pulp magazines. He lived in the Philippines when young and set his Jo Gar stories, about a Filipino detective, there. Whitfield worked as an actor and flew in France during WWI, During the 1920s he was a journalist in Pittsburgh. In 1934 he married socialite Emily Vanderbilt Thayer, who committed suicide after they broke up in 1935. Whitfield squandered his inherited fortune and died of tuberculosis in a military hospital at forty-six.

Jo Gar's Casebook is available from Crippen and Landru.

A complete Whitfield bibliography can be found here.

Mike Grost on Raoul Whitfield

Raoul Whitfield's best pulp stories, like those of his friend Dashiell Hammett, center around fair play, puzzle plot mysteries. Some of these have ingenious solutions, e.g., "Death in the Pasig" (1930). Whitfield's work shows a consciousness of the whodunit tradition that was flourishing in the detective story outside of the pulps during his era. His novel The Virgin Kills (1932) involves a hybrid of the pulp story and the Golden Age mystery novel.

Surrounding this whodunit is a portrait of tough city life. Whitfield's work is more civic than Hammett's, more oriented to the hardball politics and sometimes corrupt public life of typical cities. Whitfield's work seems much less violent than some of his hard-boiled contemporaries. It also seems to be among the most realistic. Hammett had a personal vision of worlds where social authority had broken down. Whitfield had nothing this personal or this artistic, but he did have a sober, steady exploration of the real life, rough world of public life, one that is not present to such a degree in Hammett's more personal art. Whitfield is also interested in business organizations, such as newspapers or Hollywood studios, in a way not typical of Hammett or his contemporaries. He liked to draw pictures of tough, authoritative bosses in such organizations, often apparently condemning them, but with a sneaking fondness underneath. Even his detectives seem like shrewd businessmen. So, to a degree, seem Nebel's later characters, especially Cardigan and the Cosmos Detective Agency.

Jo Gar, Whitfield's Filipino detective, is one of the earliest and most important of all Third World detectives. It seems fortunate that the Jo Gar stories have now been collected in book form as Jo Gar's Casebook (2002), as so far they come across as Whitfield's best work. Whitfield's detailed portrait of life in the Philippines anticipates Blochman's later novels set in India. Blochman's point of view is relentlessly middle class - he focuses on the merchants and business people of Calcutta - while Whitfield's is a bit more hard-boiled, centering on entertainers, hotel owners, gamblers, and the other denizens of night club life that had such interest to Black Mask writers of the era, as well as the police and private detectives. If Whitfield's depiction of the Philippines was "tough", it was not condescending to a third world country - Whitfield showed the same hard-boiled look at the US city of Pittsburgh in "Inside Job" (1932).

Whitfield's work is often considered to suffer from unevenness, and just plain hack writing. Some of his fiction wallows in despair: the protagonist looks at all the havoc greed and revenge has cost, and feels a tragic sense of loss. Bullfeathers! This might be "hard-boiled", but it is really hard to take. His Death in a Bowl (1930), set in Hollywood, seems much less interesting than his short stories. Nor did I like the much praised tale "Mistral" (1931), set on the Riviera, where Whitfield had gone to live. "Mistral" has some good descriptive writing about the Riviera, just as the Gar stories describe the Philippines, but it also has one of Whitfield's despair-filled bummers of a finale. "Sal the Dude", the conclusion of a 1929 story sequence later published in book form as Five, also wallows in angst. It is a pure crime adventure story, with no mystery. It is also not very good, until the last few pages, when it takes to the air for a vivid duel. Whitfield also wrote numerous air adventure tales, and here he is showing his air ace stuff in the mystery field. Whitfield's three - D sound and light shows in the air remind me of no one so much as William Hope Hodgson, who also liked complex visual and geometric spectacles. I especially like the moment when the hero drops the flares.

Still, I feel great reservations about such World War I air ace turned pulp fiction writers of air adventure as Whitfield and Horace McCoy. While they present a macho image, basically what they had in common was despair.

The villain in "Sal" is eager to get money so that he can go and live in Europe, just like his creator was about to do. One tends to think of American expatriates as writers of literary fiction, such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But pulp writers of the era, like Whitfield and Max Brand, also went abroad.