West of Guam (4 page)

The best sources on Whitfield’s final years are Hammett’s letters. In the late 1930s and early ’40s, Dash and Pru became lovers. She kept him abreast of Raoul’s troubles, while he gave her advice, and passed the news on to Hellman. In a letter dated August 29, 1943, Hammett writes Hellman from his post in Alaska: “Pru Whitfield wrote me that Raoul is dying of T.B. in a San Fernando hospital and that Lois, his third wife, ‘fell’ (the quotes are Pru’s) out of a window in San Francisco recently and is pretty badly banged up.”
²⁷
On October 27, he offers this update: “Raoul has been, for fourteen months, in a lung-hospital in San Fernando. […] His third wife recently jumped out of a hotel window in San Francisco, and has just died.”
²⁸
Lois succumbed to her injuries on September 27, 1943, eighteen days after her twenty-eighth birthday.

On November 25, 1943, Hammett tells Hellman of a letter he received from Raoul: “Whitfield, writing me about the death by suicide of his second wife in succession, says: ‘I feel pretty much lost—I don’t seem to get over these things easily.’ You can have that for your scrapbook.”
²⁹

Then came the last rally. On February 22, 1944, Hammett tells Hellman that Whitfield “hopes to be discharged from his hospital next month. He is broke and I am sending him $500.”
³⁰
In a letter to Prudence, dated March 5, he writes:

I had a letter from Raoul late last month, sounding fairly cheerful. He said he was taking his test the next day and hoped to be saying goodbye to the hospital in March. Of you he wrote: ‘Pru is also busy, but she writes quite often and has really been a big help—though I’ll probably never admit it again.’
³¹

Less than a year later, on January 24, 1945, Raoul Whitfield passed away. On February 10, he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery. His headstone (section 4, grave 5603), reads “Raoul F. Whitfield, California, 2. Lieut. Air Service.” He had earned his stripes.

The rest of the story was just writing, but what writing it was.

¹¹
William F. Nolan, “Behind the Mask: Raoul Whitfield,” in
The Black Mask Boys Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction
(New York, N.Y.: William Morrow and Co., 1985), 129.

¹²
Raoul Whitfield, “The Men Who Made the Argosy,”
The Argosy
(March 7, 1931): 428.

¹³
Nolan, “Behind the Mask: Raoul Whitfield,” 129.

¹⁴
Whitfield, “The Men Who Made the Argosy,” 428.

¹⁵
Black Mask
(November 1926).

¹⁶
See, for instance, “Naval and Military Aeronautics,”
Aerial Age Weekly
7, no. 8 (May 6, 1918): 402, 414.

¹⁷
Whitfield, “The Men Who Made the Argosy,” 428.

¹⁸
Nolan, “Behind the Mask: Raoul Whitfield,” 130.

¹⁹
Black Mask
(June 1932), 123.

²⁰
Everybody’s Magazine 58, no. 1 (1928): 175.

²¹
EQMM
(May 1948): 40.

²²
Nolan,
Hammett: A Life at the Edge
(New York: Congdon & Weed / St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 105–6.

²³
Lillian Hellman,
Pentimento
(Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973), 130.

²⁴
Zelda Fitzgerald, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Fall 1930), in
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, intro. Eleanor Lanahan (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 94.

²⁵
Thomas Wolfe,
You Can’t Go Home Again
, intro. Gail Godwin (New York, N.Y.: Scribner, 2011), 211.

²⁶
F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Scottie Fitzgerald (December 1940), in
The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald
, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York, N.Y.: Dell, 1966), 118–119.

²⁷
Hammett, letter to Lillian Hellman (August 29, 1943), in
Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921–1960
, ed. Richard Layman, with Julie M. Rivett, intro. Josephine Hammett Marshall (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001), 222.

²⁸
Hammett, letter to Hellman (October 27, 1943), in
Selected Letters
, 246.

²⁹
Hammett, letter to Hellman (November 25, 1943), in
Selected Letters
, 254.

³⁰
Hammett, letter to Hellman (February 22, 1944), in
Selected Letters
, 287.

³¹
Hammett, letter to Prudence Whitfield (March 5, 1944), in
Selected Letters
, 295.

The letters, notes, and drafts quoted in this introduction are housed in box 34, folder 4, of the E. R. Hagemann Papers and Collection of Detective Fiction (1672), and box 5, folder 6, of the Joseph T. Shaw Papers (2052)—both in the Department of Special Collections of UCLA’s Young Research Library.

Cowley, Malcolm. “Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read.”
New Republic
78 (April 18, 1934): 283.

Duhamel, Marcel.
Raconte pas ta vie
. Paris: Mercure de France, 1972.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott.
The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald
. Edited by Andrew Turnbull. New York, N.Y.: Dell, 1966.

—.
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
. Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks. Introduction by Eleanor Lanahan. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

He is Jo Gar, the Island detective—the Philippine Islands, that is. Chances are that he was baptized Jose Garcia, although the more common nickname would have been Joe.

He was a young man, but he looked rather old. His hair was gray; he was medium in size, but because of the loose way he carried himself he appeared rather small. His face was brown—very brown. He had good teeth, a narrow lipped mouth, fine features. His eyes were slightly almond shaped, and they were seldom normally opened. They held a peculiar squint (“West of Guam,” p. 52).
¹

This was the initial description of Señor Gar by Ramon Decolta (Raoul Whitfield) in the first of twenty-four stories in
Black Mask,
February 1930 through July, 1933. As the series progressed, Decolta/ Whitfield perfected and modified the physical description and repeated, often unduly, certain salient features. His eyes are blue-gray and pronouncedly almond-shaped. His body is short and small; his shoulders, narrow; his arms, short; his feet small; and his fingers, stubby. He has a habit of running them through his gray hair. He has another habit: keeping his eyes nearly or almost closed. He speaks in a toneless voice as frequently as he smiles and shows his white, even teeth, for he is polite, above all else.

He chain-smokes brown-paper cigarettes which no one else cares for. He permits himself an occasional glass of warm or iced claret or iced lemonade. The
betel
-nut is not for him. He will wear sandals when the weather demands and he will wear either a pith helmet or a Panama hat and very suitable clothing, favoring white duck and pongee, not always as clean as they might be. He carries a .45 Army Colt automatic in right-hip pocket; he uses it quite frequently. He is right-handed. He is often the intended target of a knife, and he has been known to wield one himself in self-defense (“Nagasaki Knives”). He lives sensibly in the heat of the Western Pacific.

[He] relaxed his short body, kept his almond-shaped eyes almost closed. Now and then he lifted his brown-paper cigarette, inhaled. It was almost as though he slept between puffs … (“The Man in White,” p. 81)

He maintains a small, not particularly comfortable office “above Wong Ling’s place,” on a “narrow and curving” street, not far off the Escolta, the main business thoroughfare in Manila, and almost on the bank of the Pasig River (“Red Hemp,” p. 33; “Diamonds of Dread,” p. 83). He seldom locks it, for he keeps “little of importance” there and is seldom in it (“Signals of Storm,” p. 43). A visitor who has climbed the narrow, creaking stairs is apt to see lizards crawling on the ceiling and be annoyed by flies. The three-bladed ceiling fan, whirling at a slow speed, merely moves the tepid air around (“The Magician Murder,” p. 91). If it is not too hot, Jo will wave a palm-leaf fan. His proudest possession is a fan-backed wicker chair, and a small cabinet where he keeps his meager files. His one luxury is a latter-day obtained jade paper knife “many years old” (“The Mystery of the Fan-backed Chair,” p. 58). When he is not carrying his Colt, he keeps it in a desk drawer. The office has one other occupant: Jo’s Siamese cat, of whom he is inordinately fond. He has no secretary, no receptionist, no assistant.
²

Several times he had thought of moving into more desirable quarters, but there was something about his tiny, hot office in the old building that he liked. His fees were not big … and many of his clients were not rich. If he were to move … he would perhaps not be able to accept cases that interested him, and his contacts would be different.

He had decided that he would lose more than he would gain, and he had remained … he liked the river sounds that reached him from the dark-watered Pasig, and the odors that drifted up from the small shops near the river—odors of spices and hemp and shell foods (“China Man,” pp. 93–94).

Only very late in the series do we discover that Jo Gar owns a house with “a Spanish gate” and keeps a house-boy named Vincente (“The Amber Fan”). He habitually rises early and therefore misses his
siesta
if on a case. He owns a small automobile but he “did not like machines [autos]; he preferred a pony hauled
carromatta
to the
cales[a].
But a horse got along better in wind and rain” (“Signals of Storm,” p. 46). He is a devotee of cockfights and magic performances. He knows a good deal about Siamese cats and pearls. “He thought of the [Randonn] pearls. They were the finest he had ever seen. He had looked at many, in the South Seas and the Orient. He was something of an authority on them” (“Nagasaki Bound,” p. 104). It is too bad that we know nothing of his family, his education, his background.

He is a polyglot: he speaks English, Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese (“a tongue with which he had difficulty” [“The Blind Chinese,” p. 44]), Japanese, and Malay (“softly and not perfectly” [“China Man,” p. 101]), precisely what he needs in polyethnic Manila in the early 1930s, then a city of only some 350,000, over ten per cent of whom were Chinese. (The population now, by the way, is over one and one-quarter million.)

“In Manila—many people have tried to murder me,” Jo calmly informs Benfield, a deadly antagonist (“The Blind Chinese,” p. 38). And understandably so, for The Island Detective is an implacable foe. The point was—there were many enemies. Almost always, when Jo Gar caught a man, there was a conviction. The caught one remembered, and his relatives and friends remembered. There were many enemies. Señor Gar had a reputation—criminals were afraid of him and hated him (“China Man,” p. 96).

And his reputation precedes him and follows him wherever he may go. In “West of Guam,” the first story, the Army officers and enlisted men aboard the transport U.S.S.
Thomas
have heard of him. Colonel Dunbar, the CO., testily requests that Jo set to and help solve the murder of Captain Jerry Lintwell, U.S.A., which of course he does. He approaches Private Burker, a suspect.

“Don’t rise,” he stated. “I’m Mr. [sic] Gar—perhaps you know that.” The private nodded. “Guess we all do,” he stated.

“You’re that Manila soft-shoe—the guy that always gets his man.” … Jo Gar shook his head.

“Not always,” he stated. “Two years ago I failed. China is a difficult country. A transport at sea has advantages” (“West of Guam,” p. 55).

Incidentally, Jo is a passenger and is bringing back to Manila criminal he apprehended in Honolulu.

Naturally, because of his work in The Pearl of the Orient, he brushes up against the local police force.”
³
Five years ago, before he became a private detective, he had been on the police (“Death in the Pasig,” p. 49). His friend and comrade was Lieutenant Juan Arragon, now his friendly but suspicious antagonist. Poor Arragon—he is rarely right in his “solutions.”

The lieutenant preferred action to thought. He was often too anxious. Thus, he had often failed where Jo Gar, proceeding in an almost sleepy manner, had succeeded. Jo suited his action to the climate of the Islands. Manila was not New York or San Francisco (“Signals of Storm,” p. 49).

Nonetheless, Arragon is gracious in defeat, but there is Carlysle, who does not always appreciate the diminutive detective. There are times when solving a “crime, in Manila, [is] a delicate affair” (“Death in the Pasig,” p. 104), and Arragon never completely trusts Jo, who might favor a client instead of justice.

The two of them argue amiably but acerbically. During an investigation, Arragon insists that Gary Landon, a second-rate theatrical performer, was a suicide. Gar insists that he was a murderer.

Arragon grunted in disgust, “You have been right too often, perhaps,” he said. “You wish to be different.”

Jo Gar said: “You have been wrong so much, Juan, but you still wish to be the same” (“Enough Rope,” p. 31).

But when Arragon is killed pursuing jewel-robbers in Manila, Jo, shrugging off Carlysle’s request for help, goes after the gang with only one thought in mind: revenge—but more on this later in the article. Arragon is superseded by Lieutenant Sadi Ratan, immaculate, “very handsome and well built for a Filipino” (“Shooting Gallery”). For Jo, the situation is never the same again north and south of the Pasig.

The Filipino [Ratan] looked hatred at the Island detective, and Jo Gar thought of the difference in this second-in-command to the American head (now Major Kelvey) of the Manila force—and the dead Juan Arragon. This man hated him. Arragon had disagreed with him, argued with him, but he had never hated (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 56).