Raoul Whitfield
[3][4] By the mid-1930s, the amount of work Whitfield produced dropped substantially as he suffered what the Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw described as a "personal tragedy.
"[5] Both his second and third wife died by suicide;[6][note 1] in his later years, despite coming into money, Whitfield was broke and suffering from tuberculosis.
[3][6][7][8][9][10][note 3] Whitfield used the middle name "Fauconnier" in his writing[7][8][11] while his official birth certificate uses the Anglicized version "Falconer.
[6][note 5] In his adolescence, he accompanied his father to the Philippines, where the older Whitfield was working for the Territorial Government during the American colonial era.
[3][6][7] After recovering, Whitfield spent some time in Hollywood working as a silent-film actor prior to the advent of the star system.
Whitfield's use of pen names grew from the editorial policy of pulp magazines not to feature more than one story under the same byline in a single issue.
[6] By February 1930, a poll announced Whitfield a favorite amongst the Black Mask readers, alongside Caroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, Dashiell Hammett, and Gardner.
[3][22][30] In his "Crime Wave" column for the New York Evening Post, Hammett praised his friend's novel,[30] writing, "The plot doesn't matter.
[6] The novel was also favorably reviewed by Will Cuppy of the New York Herald Tribune, who called it "by several miles the slickest detective job of the season" in a year that saw Hammett's own The Maltese Falcon (1930) released.
[6] After Green Ice was translated into French by Marcel Duhamel, it "led the way" for new American genre of noir fiction in France.
[3][6] With the story "West of Guam" published in the February 1930 issue of the Black Mask, Whitfield introduced the character of Spanish-Filipino "island detective" Jo Gar, short for Jose Garcia, under the pen name Ramon Decolta.
[26] The pen name allowed Whitfield to publish several stories in a single issue of the Black Mask, so long as they were under distinct bylines.
After taking a hiatus from writing, he produced two more Jo Gar stories, this time published under his own name, in Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan.
This included Whitfield's last published work, the Jo Gar story "The Great Black" in their August 1937 issue.
[35] In the June 1932 issue of the Black Mask, Shaw wrote: "As this number goes to print, Raoul Whitfield has hied himself hence to Hollywood on a long period contract with Paramount on terms that will take all the press out of the Depression.
It began shooting in early 1933 with an adapted screenplay by Rian James, director Michael Curtiz, and William Powell starring as the detective Donald Free.
[3][6][43][44] In the April 22, 1933 edition of The Hollywood Reporter, Whitfield took out an advertisement that read:[45]MAY I congratulate those gentlemen of Warner Brothers who, when I finished the shooting script from my original story "THE PRIVATE DETECTIVE," must have worked so hard over it to effect so many changes?
[19][6] Justin Gautreau argues that the B-film crime drama Moonlight Murders (1936) is an adaptation of the novel Death in a Bowl (1931).
[46] The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film, however, does not include Whitfield's name anywhere;[46] it credits "the original story" to Albert J. Cohen and Robert T. Shannon, with a screenplay by Edgar Allan Woolf and Florence Ryerson.
[48] In January 1933, he adapted his short story "Mistral" into a three-act play with his soon-to-be second wife, Emily Davies Vanderbilt Thayer.
[3] During his separation from Prudence, Whitfield met his second wife, New York socialite Emily O'Neill (née Davies) Vanderbilt Thayer (1903–1935).
[60] On December 7, 1928, soon after receiving a final decree of divorce from Vanderbilt,[61] she married theatrical producer and aviator Sigourney Thayer (1896–1944).
[64] On February 21, 1935, Emily filed a suit for divorce against Whitfield in the San Miguel Country Court, alleging cruel and inhuman conduct, physical violence and violent and improper language.
By 1942, Whitfield was a resident of the Veterans Hospital in San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, dealing with tuberculosis.
In the collection, Shaw recognized Whitfield's work as a pioneer of the hard-boiled school along with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Paul Cain, and Lester Dent, among others.
[74] Despite his prolific writing during his career, Whitfield has been referred to as biographically and critically neglected,[2] leading to the nickname "the Black Mask's forgotten man.
"[3][4] Boris Dralyuk writes: "It is now customary to weigh the lesser known Black Mask boys against the two who made it, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler [...] and it has hurt no one as consistently as it has Raoul Whitfield.
"[6] Whitfield's first novel, Green Ice (1930), was recognized by Jean-Paul Schweighaeuser as "leading the way" for noir fiction in France.
"[32] A similar assessment of the novel is made by David Fine, who writes: "Among the Black Mask writers, Raoul Whitfield, Caroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Paul Cain set the tone for the Southern California brand of hard-boiled fiction.
"[76] Similarly, in 2002, Peter Ruber and Victor Berch remark that "only Jo Gar is worthy of standing alongside other great detectives,"[3] while Dralyuk considers him "the most discerning of Whitfield's creations.
