West of Guam (2 page)

It appears that Whitfield had all the “well-known props” at hand, but aspired to get along without them, to be a “good writer.” As Shaw put it, “Whit was ambitious. He wanted to invade other fields than that of crime detection and criminal conflict.” This version of Whitfield—the competent, workaday storyteller reaching beyond his hard-won skills and meager talents—doesn’t quite jibe with the other, more intimate account that emerged at around the same time.

The only substantial description we have of Whitfield’s actual process comes from his first wife, Prudence, who took it upon herself to preserve her former husband’s legacy after his death in 1945. Between 1947 and 1949 Pru managed to republish six of Whitfield’s stories in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
. Frederic Dannay, one half of the Queen franchise and the primary editor of
EQMM
, was himself an advocate of Whitfield’s work. He mined his conversations and correspondence with Pru for valuable, if not always reliable, information, which he then doled out in headnotes to the stories. Here is Pru’s vivid description of Whit at work, care of Dannay:

Raoul Whitfield always wrote very easily and quickly, and with a minimum of correction. He had a particular talent for starting with a title and writing around it. His wife has said that once he had a title, he had the story. He would place neat stacks of chocolate bars (which he ate by the thousands) to the right of his typewriter and a picket fence of cigarettes to his left. He wrote and chain-smoked and ate, all in one unified operation. He could be surrounded by a cocktail party going at full blast—and keep right on writing.
³

More on those cocktail parties later. First, another tidbit from Pru and Dannay:

The fact is, Raoul Whitfield needed very little to start him on a story. An incident which most people would consider trivial, a newspaper account buried on an inside page, a casual remark by a stranger—these were the fragile details out of which he wove flashing designs.
⁴

Place this next to Pru’s image of “Hammett writing laboriously, alone in a room, with dirty dishes strewn all over the kitchen floor,”
⁵
and a neat dichotomy begins to take shape: Dash slaved away on masterpieces, while Whit dashed off “flashing designs.”

Shaw’s Whit is yeomanlike and ambitious, while Pru’s hums along like a well-oiled machine; neither can really match Hammett, the inspired perfectionist.

In truth, Whitfield was no less agile a hardboiled stylist than Hammett. On that score, one could cite the unfailing instincts of French connoisseurs: The first hardboiled novel translated by Marcel Duhamel, the editor of Gallimard’s Série Noire, was neither
Red Harvest
nor
The Maltese Falcon
, but Whitfield’s
Green Ice
(
Les Émeraudes sanglantes
, Gallimard, 1931).
⁶
As Jean-Paul Schweighaeuser writes in
Le roman noir français
(1984), for France, “Raoul Whitfield led the way.”
⁷
Meanwhile, F. Scott Fitzgerald—a native-born cognoscente of the genre—was ready to declare Whitfield “as good as Hammett” when suggesting neglected books to Malcolm Cowley in the April 18, 1934 issue of
New Republic
.
⁸

Or one could take Dash’s own word for it. He and Whitfield had a profound appreciation for each other’s writing. It was Hammett who recommended Whitfield’s
Black Mask
“Crime Breeder” series to Blanche Knopf for hardcover publication as
Green Ice
. Some years earlier, Dannay reports, Whitfield had gone to bat for Dash in the magazine trade:

Whitfield was writing prolifically and being published like mad, but Hammett’s stories were appearing only now and then. Whitfield, who was surely one of Hammett’s first boosters, used to write many letters to editors asking: “Where is this man, Hammett? Why don’t you accept more of his stories?”
⁹

Hammett’s review of
Green Ice
in the
New York Evening Post
gives us a good sense of just what he saw in his friend’s work: “The plot does not matter so much. What matters is that here are two hundred and eighty pages of naked action pounded into a tough compactness by staccato, hammerlike writing.”
¹⁰

No, it wasn’t just the ease with which Whitfield spun his plots. The plots didn’t matter nearly as much as the “hammerlike” style, and the world of “naked action” it depicted. To be sure, Whitfield was capable of lyricism, and the language of the Jo Gar tales, like the detective himself, is redolent of “the climate of the Islands” (“Signals of Storm” [1930]). But it is Whitfield’s command of the tough, laconic mode that sets him apart. The following passage from
Green Ice
, in which Mal Ourney peruses a newspaper account of a gangland murder, distills the hardboiled to its essence: “‘Angel’ Cherulli had been found in an alley behind his club, with a flock of thirty-eights in his stomach and chest. There wasn’t a clue. He had many enemies. The rest of the story was just writing.” Nothing else need be said. Each declarative sentence carries a load. Neither Ourney nor Whitfield is about to waste precious time on “just writing.”

And therein lies a key animating tension of hardboiled prose: It is a literature that aspires to silence. A protagonist boiled hard enough has no use for words at all. Action alone counts. At its best, the action of hardboiled fiction reflects not only the unrelenting brutality of life as its authors see it, but also a kind of transcendent mindfulness beyond matter, a presence in the moment. There is a strangely meditative quality to Whitfield’s most frantic and violent scenes, even if the Buddha ends up as collateral damage:

Van Cleve turned his back. He took two steps towards the door that led from the library to the living room and the phone. Then he leaped to one side. Barney’s gun crashed, and the Buddha on the library table shot jade chips across the amber light from the table lamp. Dale Byrons screamed. (Killers’ Carnival)

The finest hardboiled stylists—like Whitfield, Hammett, and the consciously “ultra-hardboiled” Paul Cain—are true modernists; their dissatisfaction with language’s insufficiency, its inability to capture “naked action,” drives them toward ever-greater experimentation, ever-greater refinement. Ultimately, it drives them to silence.

²
Burton Rascoe, review of
Death in a Bowl
,
Arts & Decoration
35, no. 4 (August 1931): 83.

³
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (October 1947): 16.

⁴
EQMM
(March 1949): 81.

⁵
EQMM
(May 1948): 40.

⁶
See Marcel Duhamel,
Raconte pas ta vie
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), 293.

⁷
Jean-Paul Schweighaeuser,
Le roman noir français
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984), 16.

⁸
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Malcolm Cowley, “Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read,”
New Republic
78 (April 18, 1934): 283.

⁹
EQMM
(May 1948): 40.

¹⁰
Dashiell Hammett, review of
Green Ice
,
New York Evening Post
, July 19, 1930, p. 5A.

Raoul Whitfield’s road to
Black Mask
has been difficult to trace, and his life after he left the magazine proved sensational enough to inspire a detective novel. The scholars brave enough to delve into his biography—and there haven’t been many—have had to rely mostly on Whitfield’s own statements and the recollections of Prudence, substantiating whatever they could with other documents. E. R. Hagemann, whose pioneering articles on Whitfield appeared in
The Armchair Detective
in 1980 and 1981, and William Nolan, whose short essay on Whitfield in
The Black Mask Boys
(1985) filled in a few important blank spots, were later interrogated and amended by Peter Ruber and Victor A. Berch in their article “Raoul Whitfield: Black Mask’s Forgotten Man.” Unfortunately, Ruber and Berch’s piece is itself not wholly accurate. The following sketch of Whitfield’s life draws on all of these previous efforts to reconstruct Whitfield’s life, as well as on newly discovered material.

Raoul F. Whitfield was born in New York City on November 22, 1896, and that middle “F” is the first trap to ensnare his biographers. Ruber and Berch, who examined Whitfield’s birth certificate (NYC #50974), have uncovered “the interesting fact that his real middle name was ‘Falconia’—not the artistic invention of ‘Fauconnier,’ which he tacked onto his byline to make his name sound exotic or unique.” The spelling of “Falconia” is also born out by Whitfield’s California death certificate, but not by his World War II draft card—on which a clerk has rendered it “Falknia”—or by census and marriage records for various years. The variants include Whitfield’s preferred “Fauconnier,” “Faulkener,” “Falconier,” and simply “Falconer.”

None of this is surprising. Clerks regularly make hash of names, and families themselves have been known to adjust them willy-nilly. Nor is “Fauconnier” particularly “exotic or unique”; it is simply French for “falconer.” A part of Whitfield’s family descended from Pierre Fauconnier, a sixteenth-century Huguenot refugee to London whose great-grandson—also named Pierre—arrived in New York in 1702 and became a major figure in the colonial administration. Subsequent generations adopted the Anglicized spelling “Falconer.”

Whitfield inherited his protean middle name from his maternal grandmother, Anne Eliza Whitfield, nee Falconer. The 1880 U.S Census has the forty-two-year-old Anne living in New York City with her husband, sixty-five-year-old James Madison Whitfield, a prosperous “manufacturer of plumbing materials” (pull pumps for ale and soda-water, to be exact). Their son, William Falconer Whitfield, was born on August 13, 1869, and went on to marry a namesake, Mabelle Parisette Whitfield, on October 18, 1895. Mabelle was born on April 7, 1872, to Charles H. and Emilie Louise Whitfield, nee Hadley. In their article, Ruber and Berch ask, “Could Raoul Whitfield’s parents have been cousins?” They were: Various volumes of
Trow’s New York City Directory
for the 1850s and ’60s list Mabelle’s father, Charles H. Whitfield, as a plumber at 262 Water Street, working alongside his brother James M. Whitfield and their father, George B., in the family’s plumbing concern.

In addressing Raoul Whitfield’s “social status,” William Nolan writes that “the
Cleveland Press
identified him as ‘Andrew Carnegie’s nephew.’”
¹¹
The relationship was a bit more distant than that. Carnegie’s wife Louise was the daughter of John William Whitfield, a New York City importer of “fancy dress materials,” who was a son of George B. Whitfield—making him a brother of Raoul Whitfield’s paternal and maternal grandfathers, James and Charles. Marriage between cousins in the rarified heights of New York society was a common occurrence. But leaving the mating habits of the moneyed aside, one thing is for sure: The young Raoul would not starve.

We know that Raoul’s father, William Falconer Whitfield, was attached to the Territorial Government in Manila. Records show he was an accountant. Raoul accompanied his father to the Philippines, making trips to Japan and China, soaking up the local color he’d later use in his brilliant Jo Gar tales. Here’s how Raoul summed up his travels in a headnote to “Delivered Goods,” which ran in the November 1926 issue of
Black Mask
: “Have chased around China, played in the Philippines, hummed at Honolulu.” And here he is again, with a bit more detail, in a 1931 self-profile for
The Argosy
(“The Men Who Made the Argosy,” March 7, 1931): “To Guam, Manila and Japan at the age of eighteen. Several months in Hawaii on return.”
¹²
Ruber and Berch write, “We know this happened before 1900 because the elder Whitfield was not listed in the New York City Directory for that year, nor did his name turn up in the U.S. Census for 1900.” But that doesn’t jibe with Whitfield’s account; he would have been a toddler. And sure enough, the 1905 New York Census has the Whitfields boarding at 140 West 93
^rd
Street, while the 1910 U.S. Census has the family living at 251 West 88
^th
Street. The Hagemann papers at UCLA also hold a 1981 letter from the Director of Alumni Relations of New York’s prestigious Trinity School, which affirms that Whitfield attended the institution from 1904 to 1912, leaving after the eighth grade.

Raoul’s return to the States via Honolulu in 1916 was precipitated by an illness, the nature of which remains unclear. He claims to have spent the next year or so puttering around Hollywood, appearing now and again on the silver screen. Whitfield’s biographers find this credible enough, with Nolan writing in
The Black Mask Boys
:

Whitfield was a handsome fellow, inclined to be photographed with a rakish scarf at his neck. A tall six-footer, he sported a fashionable cane and custom-leather gloves, parted his dark, slicked-back hair in the middle, had a cleft chin (a la Cary Grant) and a neatly trimmed mustache.
¹³

Although no records, much less footage, of Whitfield’s first stay in Hollywood have turned up at this point, there’s no reason to disbelieve him. The star system hadn’t yet taken hold in 1916, and actors often appeared in films without credit.

Whitfield’s next adventure—his stint in the Great War—left much more of a mark on him and his writing, and has inspired much more controversy among his biographers. The most colorful summaries of Whitfield’s military service belong to his own pen. Here, for example, is a typically laconic passage from his self-profile in
The Argosy
:

Came the World War. Enlisted in American Ambulance Service, and was in the first uniformed unit to march into Allentown, Pennsylvania. Transferred to Air Service. Ground school training at Princeton. Air training at Kelly Field, San Antonio, Texas. Commissioned and ordered overseas. Crossed doing sub-watch in the crow’s nest. Trained, instructed and ferried various types of ships at Issoudoun, Orly, Romorantin and St. Jean de Monts, France. Several soft crashes and one not so soft. Up front on the Nancy-Toule sector, eleven days before the armistice was signed.
¹⁴