Authors: Raoul Whitfield
West of Guam
The Complete Cases of Jo Gar
From the pages of
Black Mask
Raoul Whitfield
The
Black Mask
Library
Keith Alan Deutsch, Series Editor
Introduction by
Boris Dralyuk
Illustrations by
Arthur Rodman Bowker
Essay by
E. R. Hagemann
Raul Whitfield: An Introduction by Boris Dralyuk
Ramon Decolta AKA Raoul Whitfield, and His Diminutive Brown
Man: Jo Gar, the Island Detective
The Mystery of the Fan-backed Chair
An Introduction
Boris Dralyuk
I.
The Human Element
“Just the regular words one human uses on another—when there’s hate.”
—
Death in a Bowl
(1931)
Raoul Whitfield’s subject is the human. More often than not, it is the killing of a human. Not of a man or a woman, a gangster or a moll, a bystander or someone who has it coming—but simply a human. Human is a broad, indiscriminate category. It is a species, and sometimes hardly even that. Whitfield’s humans may be as insensate and insignificant as grains of wheat: “The roar of the plane’s engines filled the bowl of humans, beat down upon it.” The bowl in question is the iconic Hollywood amphitheater, but it’s really an oversize ceramic mortar; some human is about to get crushed.
Not that humans don’t come in all shapes and sizes. The most discerning of Whitfield’s creations, the half-breed detective Jo Gar, does “not believe too much in the similarity of humans” (“Death in the Pasig” [1930]), but the differences are mostly a matter of physiognomy. Humans have plenty in common otherwise. In
Death in a Bowl
(1931), the director Ernst Reiner looks down at Maya Rand, his star, and concludes, “She was very beautiful, but very difficult to work with. For that matter all humans were difficult to work with.” What most of them share is a tremendous capacity for craven self-interest, greed, and deceit. “So many humans like to tell lies,” complains Ben Jardinn, the P.I. tasked with solving Reiner’s brother’s murder, “It’s hell finding out what really happens.” Or as another eye, Mel Crozier, puts it in
The Virgin Kills
(1932), “Any human being can lie—they can lie in groups.”
This odd usage of the word “human” is a stylistic signature that runs across Whitfield’s work, whether it was published under his own name or under those of Ramon Decolta—the pseudonym he used for the Jo Gar stories—and Temple Field—which he used for the novels
Five
(1931) and
Killers’ Carnival
(1932). Of course, with the
Black Mask
school, style is always more than style. All these “humans” are up to something.
Whitfield’s characters engage in a kind of hardboiled anthropology, and the results of their fieldwork are anything but encouraging. Mal Ourney, the self-appointed avenger of Whitfield’s first novel,
Green Ice
(1930), sums it up nicely: “I got the idea that just a few humans were using a lot of other humans as they wanted, then framing them, smashing them—rubbing them out.” The situation to which Ourney refers is a specific one, but it is also indicative of the general state of things. This, gentle reader, is a vision of humanity. It is a vision that found its ultimate expression in a style of prose perfected in
Black Mask
.
This vision was shaped by the experience of mechanized warfare in the 1910s, by first- and second-hand glimpses of gangland atrocities in the 1920s, and by the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. It is characterized by a pervasive sense of distrust and calls for a toughness bordering on cruelty. And yet, as Carolyn See eloquently notes with regard to Whitfield’s Jardinn, “the reader knows that this toughness, too, is only appearance, an individual’s defense against an intolerably meaningless world.”
1
Unlike his more radical contemporary, Paul Cain, whose antihero Gerry Kells is simply an element of the “intolerably meaningless world,” Whitfield equips his protagonists with a moral compass and a compulsion to set things right. The fact that these characters’ task is essentially Sisyphean—that they operate in a world that cannot truly be righted—lends Whitfield’s best fiction a sense of human tragedy absent from Cain’s uncompromisingly bleak
Fast One
(1932).
Whitfield broke into
Black Mask
in March 1926, with the third-person aviation adventure “Scotty Troubles Trouble.” The February 1934 issue marked his final appearance in the magazine’s pages—a standalone first-person private-eye tale titled “Death on Fifth Avenue.” All told, he managed to place ninety stories with
Black Mask
, exploring a vast variety of settings, characters, and narrative perspectives. In the 1970s, Whitfield’s first wife, Prudence, told Keith Alan Deutsch that Raoul saw himself as the originator of the “flying ace” genre. This may be true, but it is only a small part of his contribution. Whitfield’s characters—most notably, the Island detective Jo Gar, the conscientious gambler Alan Van Cleve, the dogged avenger Mal Ourney, and the prototypical Hollywood P.I., Ben Jardinn—have real depth and continue to resonate with modern readers. They set a high standard for generations of hardboiled protagonists to come.
1
Carolyn See, “The Hollywood Novel: The American Dream Cheat,” in
Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties
, ed. David Madden (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 205.
Whit and Dash
It is now customary to weigh the lesser-known
Black Mask
boys against the two that made it, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. To weigh them, that is, and find them wanting. Since Chandler put his own unmistakable spin on the
Black Mask
house style, it is Hammett’s work that generally serves as the gold standard for the pure hardboiled mode. And none of the other pulpsters, the majority of critics have it, quite measures up. This opinion took hold in the early 1930s, when a couple of Hammett’s colleagues followed him into the hardboiled market—and it has hurt no one as consistently as it has Raoul Whitfield.
Even those critics who appreciated Whitfield’s novels compared him unfavorably to Hammett. Burton Rascoe’s otherwise glowing review in the August 1931 issue of
Arts & Decoration
, which praises
Black Mask
’s editor Capt. Joseph T. Shaw for sponsoring Hammett and Whitfield, demonstrates this tendency:
Another writer Mr. Shaw has nurtured and developed in
Black Mask
is Raoul Whitfield and before the field gets too crowded with people congratulating Mr. Shaw on his discovery and shouting applause to Whitfield, I want to get in a yell for him. Take a look into his new novel.
Death in a Bowl
(Knopf). If you get that far, you will be glued to your chair until you finish reading it. So far Whitfield seems a notch below Hammett as a character creator and he is not as careful a writer as Hammett; but he is inventive and dramatic and his hard-boiled people are hard-boiled people.
2
There were, of course, a few dissenting voices, like that of the
New York Herald Tribune
’s Will Cuppy, who declared
Green Ice
“by several miles the slickest detective job of the season,” besting
The Maltese Falcon
. But such voices were far between.
Cap Shaw himself gave in to the temptation to stack Whitfield against Hammett. Drafting an introduction to his
Hard-Boiled Omnibus
in 1947, Shaw characterized Whitfield as a “hard, patient, determined worker. His style from the first was hard and brittle and over-inclined to staccato. Later, he became more fluent.” When he writes that Whitfield rose to stand “shoulder to shoulder with the best of them,” it’s clear he has Hammett’s lanky frame in mind.
Shaw then relays a fascinating anecdote about
Black Mask
shoptalk:
Long and fascinating were the discussions between Whit and Dash. Whit maintained that, given characters and a general plot, it was a cinch to write a detective story. When in a spot, all you need do is use the well-known props. A good writer should produce a novel without any of these appurtenances to achieve effect. And Dash’s comeback, “All right, if you want to make it the hard way, try writing a book omitting every word that has the letter ‘f’ for example.”