Green Ice

Raoul Whitfield:

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 of animal, 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 (1933).

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.

II. Whit and Dash

It is now customary to weigh the lesser-known Black Mask boys against the two who made it big, 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.

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 saidthat 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 yeoman like 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, hammer like 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 hammer like 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.

III. The Rest of the Story…

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 93rd Street, while the 1910 U.S. Census has the family living at 251 West 88th 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

From the very start of his writing career, so much of which was bound up with aviation, Whitfield claimed to have flown during the war. He stuck to his guns like a flyboy in a dogfight. Here is a portion of the 1926 headnote to Delivered Goods:

… served my time overseas in