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RARA-AVIS: Whitfield et al.
Interesting to get some positive response to a possible collection of Raoul
Whitfield's short stories and those by other hardboiled pulp authors.
Whitfield wrote some very tough short stories and novelettes, especially about the
Philippine PI Jo Gar (under the pseudonym Raoul Decolta). Other
possibilities--without trying to define the absolute hardboiledness
of their protagonists--include Richard Sale (and his newspaper sleuth
Daffy Dill, or Captain MacGrail), Ken Crossen (and Mortimer Death),
MacKinlay Kantor (the Pulitzer prize winner who was an active pulp
writer in the 30's), the recently deceased William Campbell Gault
(who wrote some interesting tough pulp stories in the 40s), and
others--anyone going through Shaw's anthology--or those of Bill
Pronzini and others--can add names to the list.
Some writers who are still living wrote some good pulp PI
tales--Talmage Powell, Harold Q. Masur, and the Grand Old Man of the
Pulps (87 this year) Hugh B. Cave, who wrote about Peter Kane for
BLACKMASK. Fedogan & Bremer is doing a retrospective of Cave's
horror writings (he's still an active writer), and I hope they'll
follow with his PI stuff.
They're about half a dozen uncollected Paul Cain stories--other than those in SEVEN SLAYERS
(which I think is still available from Black Lizard, or from the
Blood and Guts Press--a perfect name for a hardboiled publisher!)
Some of Robert Leslie Bellem's stories about Dan Turner and
Todhunter's Ballard's about Bill Lennox were collected in by Bowling
Green University Popular press. They're worth reading, even though
the reproductions from the original pulp pages are swimming with
broken type.
The problem for a small press publisher like Crippen & Landru is
selling enough copies of a book to break even--especially when
you're as amazingly undercapitalized as we are! You have to sell
primarily to the mystery-specialist bookshops, and they don't like
ordering books that are not by current writers or the most famous
writers of the past. Sadly, few modern bookdealers have heard of
Raoul Whitfield.
To answer a question: Ed Gorman writes a couple series of private eye
novels about Jack Dwyer and Jack Walsh, and he is often considered
one of the best current short story writers. He often tends toward
Dark Suspense. Michael Collins created Dan Fortune, a one-armed PI,
back in the 50's --Edgar winner for best first novel. His stories may not be quite tough enough for some
Rara-Avis people, but they're beautifully written and plotted.
Doug Greene
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