Raoul Whitfield
Raoul Whitfield was an American writer born in New York City in 1898, known for his contributions to the hard-boiled detective genre. He came from a financially secure background, with notable family connections, including steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. After a series of life events, including a battle with tuberculosis and service as an aviator in World War I, Whitfield began his writing career in Pittsburgh, where he published numerous pulp stories. He gained significant recognition in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly for his work in *Black Mask* magazine, alongside contemporaries like Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner.
Whitfield was notable for creating one of the first Latino detectives in crime fiction, Jo Gar, featured in stories set in pre-World War II Philippines. His works often depicted the dark underbelly of society, including themes of crime and corruption during the Prohibition era and the gritty life of Hollywood. Despite his early success, Whitfield's writing career waned after he moved to New Mexico and faced personal tragedies, including the suicides of two wives. He ultimately died from tuberculosis in 1945 at the age of forty-six, leaving behind a legacy that remains largely forgotten today.
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Raoul Whitfield
Writer
- Born: November 22, 1898
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: January 24, 1945
- Place of death: Southern California
Biography
Raoul Whitfield wrote numerous hard-boiled detective stories that are now largely forgotten. He was born in New York City in 1898 into a financially secure family that included his relative, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. As a teenager, Whitfield traveled with his father, a federal government employee, to the Far East. After becoming ill with tuberculosis, he was sent home and eventually landed in California, where he acted in a few silent films. Tired of acting, he served as an aviator in France during World War I. After the war, he went to Pittsburgh, presumably to work his way up the management ladder in his family’s steel business. Instead, he worked at a variety of jobs, none easy to pin down. It is believed, however, that he started to write stories during this time in Pittsburgh because he had at least forty pulp stories, including tales of air adventures, published from 1924 until he began selling to Black Mask magazine in 1926.
Whitfield and his first wife, Prudence, whom he met in Pittsburgh, moved to Florida, where he began to write his hard- boiled detective stories, many for the magazine Black Mask, which had been started by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan in 1920 to publish overflow stories from their other magazine, The Smart Set. He joined other contributors, including well-known author Dashiell Hammett, his close friend as well as his wife’s reputed lover, and Erle Stanley Gardner. For eight years until 1934, Black Mask published almost one hundred of Whitfield’s stories, some of which were reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine a few decades later. During this time, Whitfield published at least sixty-seven additional stories in other magazines, some written under the pseudonyms Ramon Decolta and Temple Field.
In 1930, he began writing a series of stories under his own name that featured the first Latino detective in crime stories, Jo Gar, “the little island detective” in Manila. The stories are noted for the atmosphere of pre-World War IIPhilippines. Like most of Whitfield’s writing, the plots are good, if predictable, but the writing style does not match the stories. One critic suggested that Whitfield was a storyteller, not a novelist. Some of his crime novels are about gangsters during Prohibition, while others show the gritty, seamy side of Hollywood, with its political corruption, in the 1920’s and 1930’s. These stories are filled with street crime, extreme violence, brutality, and sexism.
In 1933, Whitfield married socialite Emily Davies Vanderbilt Thayer and went to live on a ranch in New Mexico. Not long thereafter, he lost interest in writing. In May, 1935, Thayer committed suicide after she filed for divorce in February. Whitfield inherited the ranch and the rest of her estate. He did not need to work, and he seems to have spent most of his last years drinking, virtually ceasing to write. He married Lois Bell, who in 1943 also committed suicide. Whitfield died of tuberculosis in a Southern California hospital in 1945, at the age of forty-six.