Rodney William Whitaker (June 12, 1931 – December 14, 2005) was an American film scholar and writer who wrote several novels under the pen name Trevanian.
Whitaker wrote in a wide variety of genres, achieved bestseller status, and published under several other names, as well, including Nicholas Seare, Beñat Le Cagot, and Edoard Moran.
"[2] Whitaker adamantly avoided publicity for most of his life, his real name a closely held secret for many years.
The 1980 reference book Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers listed his real name in its Trevanian entry.
[5] When Whitaker wrote his first two novels, he was chairman of the Department of Radio, TV, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin, where he continued to teach for many years.
Whitaker said his wife chose the pen name Trevanian based on her appreciation of English historian G. M. Trevelyan.
The balance of the script was written by Warren Murphy, the mystery writer perhaps best known for co-writing the Destroyer series of action novels.
Then came The Main (1976), a detective novel set in a poor neighborhood of Montreal, featuring widowed, 50-ish police lieutenant Claude LaPointe.
The wide diversity of genres led to a popular theory that "Trevanian" was a collective pen name for a group of writers working together.
After a 15-year hiatus, Trevanian returned with a Western novel called Incident at Twenty-Mile (1998), and then a collection of short stories, Hot Night in the City (2000).
His last published novel, written while he was in declining health, was The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (2005), an autobiographical[7] coming-of-age story of a boy surviving with his mother and sister in the slums of Albany, New York, in the years preceding and during World War II.
[8] Street of the Four Winds, Trevanian's tale of Parisian artists caught in the 1848 revolution, based on his research of the era, remains unpublished.