Phyllis A. Whitney

• Born: September 9, 1903
• Birthplace: Yokohama, Japan
• Died: February 8, 2008
• Place of death: Charlottesville, Virginia

Types of Plot: Psychological; cozy; amateur sleuth; historical

Contribution

Phyllis A. Whitney was one of the few mystery writers to excel in both adult and juvenile mysteries. In the sixty years after her first book appeared, she published seventy-six novels, twenty of them young-adult mysteries and thirty-nine of them adult mysteries. There is no incongruity in the Virginia State Reading Association presenting its Young Readers Award for 1997 to Whitney’s adult novel Daughter of the Stars (1994), as her mysteries can be read by every member of the family. Neither the romance nor the crime is graphic, and her characters inhabit a moral universe. Often an unsolved murder turns out to be a crime of passion or an accidental death, not a premeditated murder or a killing in cold blood. Keeping secrets has upset the balance of the universe. Once those involved give up their secrets, remorse rights the balance between right and wrong.

Whitney holds her readers by telling a good story. She spins a plot full of action and unexpected developments while allowing her heroine to grow emotionally and psychologically. Whitney was known for using a location as if it were a character. Her thorough research of a location and its history provided not only a colorful background but also important clues to the solution of the mystery. Whitney’s novels were consistently ranked as best sellers throughout her career and have been published in twenty-four languages.

Biography

Phyllis Ayame Whitney was born on September 9, 1903, to Charles Joseph Whitney and Mary Lillian Mandeville. Her American-born parents had been living in Asia. When their daughter was born in Yokohama, they gave her a middle name that means “iris” in Japanese. After her father died in 1918, Whitney and her mother returned to the United States and lived in California and Texas until her mother’s death in San Antonio in 1922. Whitney lived with her aunt in Chicago, where she graduated from high school in 1924. She married George Garner a year later. In 1928, she sold her first short story to the Chicago Daily News. She wrote in her spare time while she worked in the children’s room of the Chicago Public Library and later in area bookstores. Her daughter, Georgia, was born in 1934. Whitney had published more than one hundred short stories before her first book, the young-adult novel A Place for Ann (1941), was published.

Although in 1943 Whitney published an adult mystery, Red Is for Murder (later reissued as The Red Carnelion), in her early career she was primarily a writer of young-adult novels and mysteries. In three of her earliest books, A Star for Ginny (1942), Ever After (1943), and The Silver Inkwell (1945), her young female protagonists work toward a career in publishing, two as illustrators of children’s books and one as an author. In 1942, Whitney began a four-year stint as a children’s book editor for the Chicago Sun. She held the same position on The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1947 to 1948. In 1945, she taught children’s fiction writing at Northwestern University. Two years later, she produced a nonfictional book, Writing Juvenile Fiction, which she updated in 1976. She taught a similar course for ten years at New York University between 1947 and 1958.

In 1945, Whitney and Garner divorced. Two years later, she published the most prescient of her young-adult novels, Willow Hill. The book explores the reaction of a young white girl and her friends to the integration of a neighborhood housing project. The topic was so controversial that Whitney had to search for a publisher, but the book won a Youth Today contest as well as Book World’s Spring Book Festival Award. Seven years later, she tackled a similar subject in A Long Time Coming (1954), when her young heroine attempts to heal the rift between Hispanic migrant workers and the residents of the Midwest farm town that employs them.

Whitney married Lovell F. Jahnke in 1950. The couple lived on Staten Island, New York, for twenty years, and until Jahnke’s death in 1973, they traveled together to places that became locations in Whitney’s books. By 1950, Whitney had begun alternating between young-adult novels and young-adult mysteries, publishing approximately one per year. With the publication of The Quicksilver Pool (1955), Whitney added adult mysteries to this rotation, and by 1960, she was primarily alternating between adult and young-adult mysteries, often using a similar setting for each. For example, the young-adult mystery Secret of the Samurai Sword (1958) and the adult mystery The Moonflower (1958) both take place in Kyoto, Japan; The Secret of the Tiger’s Eye (1961) and Blue Fire (1961) take place in South Africa; The Secret of the Spotted Shell (1967) and Columbella (1966) take place in the Virgin Islands.

In 1961, The Mystery of the Haunted Pool (1960) won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best juvenile mystery. Three years later The Mystery of the Hidden Hand (1963) won the same award as well as the 1963 Sequoia Children’s Book Award. By 1975, when Whitney was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America, she had published twenty adult mysteries and nineteen young-adult mysteries. In 1988, the Mystery Writers of America designated Whitney a Grand Master of the genre. Two years later, she received the Malice Domestic Award for lifetime achievement. In 1995, the Society of Midland Authors presented her with a lifetime achievement award. Whitney died at the age of 104 on February 8, 2008 in Virginia.

Analysis

In the essentially moral and virtuous worlds of Phyllis A. Whitney’s adult and young-adult mysteries, secrets, thefts, or murders are temporary departures from the norm. Once the air is cleared, the characters can live in peace. For example, in the Mystery of the Hidden Hand, Grandfather Thanos confesses his crime and returns the stolen artifact to the museum authorities. In Amethyst Dreams (1997), the housekeeper and daughter-in-law confess to Hallie Knight and the murdered girl’s father that they covered up what was actually an accidental drowning. Whitney’s books are as much Bildungsromane as they are clever, fast-paced mysteries. Whitney’s final young-adult mystery appeared in 1977, and the young-adult worlds she created seem dated: The young people dress for dinner and respect their elders, and their elders never miss a chance to teach them a life lesson. However, like the adult mysteries, the characters reflect the four decades of change in the roles available for women in the United States and abroad that Whitney witnessed. Her early heroines might wear kid gloves, but they are as independent as the later heroines. The heroines in both the adult and young-adult novels are determined to find themselves as well as save a family, a marriage, or a home whose harmony is threatened by secrets.

Mystery of the Haunted Pool

Mystery of the Haunted Pool (1960) is Whitney’s seventh young-adult mystery and the first to win an Edgar Award. It typifies Whitney’s young-adult mysteries. Most of these mysteries are narrated in the third person from the point of view of the protagonist, a teenage girl who has been separated from her family. In this story, Susan Price moves to upstate New York from New York City to live with her aunt for a month. Her mother, her ailing father, and her three brothers will follow if she can help her aunt persuade a former Hudson River boat captain to rent his family’s mansion to them. The mansion, like the spotted shell or golden horn of later mysteries, holds the clue to a family secret. In this story, the secret is the fate of priceless jewels supposedly lost at sea a century ago by the family patriarch who had been hired to deliver them. Repaying the debt impoverished the family for generations; therefore, when the captain’s grandson is hit by a car, the captain must give up his home to pay the medical bills. Susan is the touchstone. She hears the bumps in the night, sees the face in the pool, and recovers the beads that provide clues to the location of the treasure. She is also the glue that holds the families together. She befriends the captain and his grandson as well as the mysterious neighbor who is also bent on discovering the family secret and perhaps destroying the fragile bond between generations. Her older brother arrives in time to help her, but she is the one who solves the mystery, reunites her family, and brings the captain and his grandson closer.

Mystery of the Hidden Hand

Mystery of the Hidden Hand is Whitney’s tenth young-adult mystery and the second to win an Edgar Award. It typifies Whitney’s use of exotic locations and pacing that keeps the reader guessing. An American teenager, Gale Tyler, her mother, and her brother Warren visit an aunt and cousins they have never met who live on the Island of Rhodes. Gale is the lightning rod. She sees a caped figure, discovers a guest with a grudge against their cousin’s family, and helps reconcile her cousins with their grandfather and owner of the family business, Pegasus Pottery. Gale’s new cousins and their grandfather keep secrets from each other, the deepest being the ancient marble hand hidden in Grandfather Thanos’s study. Whitney sets up the question of antiquities theft with descriptions of the beauty of the landscape, the villages, and the island’s history as well as the ruins at Camiros and Lindos that help the reader sympathize with Grandfather Thanos’s desire to keep the exquisite object he discovered in his youth during an archaeological dig. Through Gail, Whitney reveals her character’s secrets bit by bit. For example, Gale discovers that one of her new cousins is the caped figure, but she does not discover until much later who signaled the figure from the house below the hotel. Once she finds out the identity of the signaler, she must work harder to find out why he was signaling.

Seven Tears for Apollo

Seven Tears for Apollo (1963) is the adult companion book to Mystery of the Hidden Hand. It is also set in Rhodes and deals with antiquities theft. Dorcas Brandt is an American of Greek descent whose manipulative husband had grown up in Rhodes. Dorcas suspects him of antiquities theft. When she believes he has died in a plane crash, she takes their four-year-old daughter and returns to Rhodes to find the truth. Dorcas is terrorized by her husband, who ransacks her rooms, scrawls eyes on walls and mirrors, and leaves cryptic messages. She teeters on the brink of mental collapse as her friends doubt her suspicions, but she is also strong enough to persist. Again, Whitney reveals bit by bit how secrets distort and corrupt relationships. Whitney uses Dorcas’s status as a stranger to present the reader with stunning descriptions of the scenery as well as the ancient and contemporary history behind the locations and the art treasures. Whitney draws on every mother’s fear for her child’s safety to heighten the suspense. History and kidnapping converge when Dorcas discovers that her husband has been stealing ancient sculptures and replacing them with copies. Finally, all parties involved in the theft have the opportunity to confess before poetic justice ends the tale as Dorcas’s husband is killed by one of the sculptures he was stealing, freeing Dorcas to begin a new life with a new man. This book is a particularly striking example of how integral Whitney’s research is to the mystery. For example, Dorcas cannot solve the riddle of the scrawled eyes without knowing about the owl as the symbol of the goddess Athena.

Amethyst Dreams

Amethyst Dreams is Whitney’s seventy-sixth adult novel and follows a well-established pattern. The narrator is a woman who is young, but not too young. She is summoned to a place where she has never been before, and her presence sets off a chain of events that compel her to solve a mystery. In this story, Hallie Knight is summoned by the ailing father of her college friend to the family mansion on Topsail Island to discover the truth about his daughter’s mysterious disappearance from her bedroom two years before. Like many of Whitney’s heroines, Hallie is in emotional turmoil: She is fleeing the breakup of her marriage. Throughout the novel, she measures her own situation against that of the broken marriages of the characters around her. Without being clairvoyant, like many of the heroines of Whitney’s later novels, she is the psychic touchstone. She can sense the negative energy of the pool, later revealed as the murdered girl’s final resting place, as well as that of the housekeeper, later revealed as complicit in covering up the murder. Readers are attracted as much by the heroine scaring herself with her feelings of impending doom as they are by the knowledge that all will be resolved in the end.

Bibliography

DuBose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. These essays look at the lives and works of early writers such as Mary Robert Rinehart, Golden Age writers such as Agatha Christie, and modern writers such as Mary Higgins Clark. While Whitney is not covered, the biographies of women of her generation shed light on her work.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995. These essays on books about female detectives authored by women, while not discussing Phyllis Whitney directly, shed light on her fiction, as they cover both older and newer masters of the genre.

Whitney, Phyllis. Guide to Fiction Writing. Boston: The Writer, 1982. Whitney’s guide, intended to instruct would-be authors, reveals a great deal about her motivations for writing and her process.

Whitney, Phyllis. “Letter to a Young Writer.” Writer 120, no. 2 (February, 2007): 38-39. In her letter to a young writer, she urges the writer not to be too self-critical and to produce that first novel, whether great or not.

Whitney, Phyllis. Phyllis A. Whitney: The Official Web Site. http://www.phyllisawhitney.com. The official Web site for Phyllis Whitney. Contains synopses of all of her books as well as information about the author.