author
Raoul Whitfield
1897–1945
A fast, stylish crime writer from the pulp era, he helped shape the hard-boiled story long before noir became a household word. His fiction mixed speed, menace, and worldly settings, and his best-known work for Black Mask still feels sharp.
3 Audiobooks
Picture stuff
by Raoul Whitfield
The Old Lady flies
by Raoul Whitfield
Rivals of the clouds
by Raoul Whitfield
About the author
Born in New York in 1896, Raoul Whitfield spent part of his childhood in the Philippines, an experience that later fed the atmosphere and settings of some of his fiction. He became known as an American writer of adventure, aviation, and hard-boiled crime stories, and his most active publishing years ran from the mid-1920s into the mid-1930s.
Whitfield was a remarkably prolific pulp writer, publishing hundreds of short stories and serials as well as nine books. He was closely associated with Black Mask, the magazine that helped define hard-boiled detective fiction, and he is especially remembered for the Jo Gar stories and novels such as Green Ice and Death in a Bowl.
Though he is sometimes less famous today than some of his contemporaries, Whitfield is regularly placed among the important early voices of tough, modern crime writing. He died in Los Angeles in 1945.