Raoul Whitfield(1896-1945)
- Writer
Although born in New York, Raoul Fauconnier Whitfield's early life was
shaped by his father's transfer to the Philippines, where he led the
privilege life as the dependent of a Territorial Government bureaucrat.
Young Whitfield would later travel through China and Japan, and his
memory of Asia would prove to serve him well. Back in the US the
teenager aspired to motion pictures, where his rugged good looks graced
the silent cinema. If it weren't for America's entry into the Great War
in 1917 we might know him as an actor, but Whitfield enlisted in the
Army and was initially assigned to the ambulance corps. Desiring
action, he sought and won a commission as a pilot and saw duty on the
German front as a combat pilot. After the Armistice he spurned his
steel business-based family's desires, married his first wife Prudence
and landed a job with the Pittsburgh Post as a reporter. Prudence
encouraged his long-held desires to write pulp fiction stories. His
writing drew upon his childhood travels in the Far East (his "Jo Gar,
Island Detective" character was based in Manila) along with his more
recent wartime exploits. He succeeded in selling stories for "Boy's
Life", "War Stories" and "Battle Stories" (under the pseudonym Temple
Field), but he's especially notable for his contributions to Black
Mask, the creme of the pulps. His "Crime Buster" Black Mask stories
were so popular they were amalgamated into his first novel, "Green Ice"
(published in 1930). earning the praise of none other than the genre
master, Dashiell Hammett, with its
hard-as-nails emphasis on action. Whitfield had a total of nine books
published during the depths of the Great Depression. The speed in which
he ground out work was amazing, but it also drew criticism; his lesser
stories were spurned as hack work. Whitfield often wrote under the
pseudonym Ramon Dacolta, who ironically proved a heady rival in
readership popularity. Many of his 1927-33 stories easily rank with the
best authors of pulp fiction. Whitfield's screenwriting career began in
earnest after his divorce from Prudence and he relocated from Florida
to Los Angeles in 1933. He landed a job as a writer for Paramount
Pictures and, on a whirlwind trip to New York City, met and married the
wealthy and unstable Emily Davies Vanderbilt Thayer (with emphasis on
the Vanderbilt). Life was good for a short period; the couple purchased
a large ranch outside Las Vegas, Nevada, and Whitfield's writing
productivity slowed to a trickle. The Whitfields' marriage was wobbly,
however, masked by partying. Emily experienced bouts of manic
depression and the couple separated in early 1935. Her mental state was
far more fragile than anyone had imagined; she committed suicide at the
Nevada ranch that May. Whitfield was inconsolable over his wife's death
and he was utterly destroyed. Contracting TB in his 40s, he died at a
military hospital in California in 1944.