[3] Keen to be in on the wartime action, Whiting was attached to the 52nd Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, and by age 18 saw duty in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany in the latter stages of World War II, rising to the rank of sergeant.
After the war, he stayed on in Germany completing his A-levels via correspondence course and teaching English before being enrolled at Leeds University reading History and German Language.
Next followed three wartime thrillers: Lest I Fall (1956), which was awarded the George Dowty Prize at the 1956 Cheltenham Literature Festival, was optioned by Rank but never filmed, and which financed Whiting's study tour in North America and led on to a contract with the University of Maryland University College, which at that time was providing degree courses for US military officers stationed in Europe.
[citation needed] Whiting became a touring academic living in Spain, France, Germany, Turkey, and Italy while teaching military history and strategy to the US Army.
It was while doing this he would meet his first wife, Irma, whose father had suffered persecution in Hamburg for his opposition to the Nazis, and eventually the couple settled in a remote Belgian village.
[citation needed] Between 1970 and 1976, in a prolific burst, he wrote a total of 34 books which he described as "Bang-bang, thrills-and-spills" becoming one of the leading figures of the British paperback industry and its 1970s boom in novels drenched in violence and sex.
In addition to writing his novels, his weekly educational columns and dealing with his lecturing commitments, he also established a language centre in the German city of Trier and a European studies department at Bradford.