Raoul Whitfield

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Raoul Whitfield was many things: a world traveler while still very young; a silent screen actor; a World War I fighter pilot; a dilettante; and one of the founders of the hardboiled school of writing.

After the war, Whitfield became a journalist, then quit, got married, and became a full-time writer. By the late 1920s he was contributing regularly to Black Mask magazine, notably the Jo Gar stories under his pseudonym of Ramon Decolta. These stories feature slightly-built Manila detective Gar; they are brutal in the extreme, taking the new hardboiled genre as far as possible. He also published the linked stories that became the novels Green Ice and Death In A Bowl. When Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw put together his legendary Hard Boiled Omnibus, Whitfield was the only writer included twice, both under his own name and as Decolta.

In the mid-30s Whitfield got married for a second time, and stopped writing to become essentially a socialite. He traveled, drank, and went through money like it was water. The extreme productivity that marked his first decade as a writer vanished. Soon his health began to deteriorate. Ten years of high living left him seriously ill. He died in 1945.