West of Guam Page 3

  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.

  Works Cited and Consulted:

  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.

  Ramon Decolta, AKA Raoul Whitfield, and His Diminutive Brown Man: Jo Gar, the Island Detective

  E. R. Hagemann

  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 h
ouse-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).

  Ratan is vindictive, insulting, nasty—and as consistently wrong as Arragon. “You have always chosen to oppose me,” Jo rebukes. “It is a mistake to allow personal prejudice to enter matters of this sort, for in so doing you have often neglected important facts” (“The Man from Shanghai,” p. 122). Ultimately, Ratan executes a 180-degree turn and concedes that Jo is “very clever.” He says they should work together more closely. “I might even consider resigning in order to enter and strengthen your private agency.” Jo has the last devastating word. “I fear that the loss to the Force would be too great, Lieutenant” (“The Amber Fan,” p. 109).4

  Jo’s m.o. is as crafty as it is ruthless. He practices deceptiveness with gusto; indeed, his sleepy facade, his toneless voice, constitute a wile. Bluffing seldom pays, he admonishes Ratan (“The Man from Shanghai”), yet Jo will often bluff about his knowledge of testimony or evidence and ferret out the murderer or the information he wants, or both. He will lie; he will bargain, but only to his advantage. He will threaten to kill. I cannot resist quoting two fine moments when The Island Detective is in action.

  He demands that a corrupted Chinese chauffeur who has driven him into an ambush and near-death outside Honolulu take him to Tan Ying, The Blind Chinese.

  “If I take you to the place—they will kill you.”

  Jo Gar shrugged. “And if you do not take me—I will kill you,” he said. “It is a difficult position.”

  The driver said: “I am a poor man—”

  The Island detective nodded. “Then you have less to live for,” he replied. “Let us start.” (“The Blind Chinese,” p. 45)

  Don’t lie—you are dying, Jo reproves a suspect, injured in a sampan explosion on the Pasig, having already promised that “the saints will be kind” if he talks. Santos Costios admits to killing a calesa driver, among other deeds. Thereupon, Gar cynically comments to Arragon that Costios only thinks he is going to die.

  The Filipino was staring at Jo Gar and cursing him in a stronger voice. He was accusing [him] of tricking him. He was not going to die, after all.

  Jo Gar interrupted, sighing. “I should have said, you’re not going to die yet,” he corrected. “For the murder of the cales[a] driver—you will die, of course. You are pleased?”

  Costios cursed in a weaker tone (“The Caleso Murders,” pp. 101–2).

  In another case, Jo directs his client, Lemere, to summon the police. Damn the police! Replies the curio dealer. Damning the police does little good—call them, tell them the truth. “‘They will do interesting things.’” Lemere reluctantly assents and then asks Gar what he will do. “ ‘I shall talk and think. Counteracting a bad habit with a good one’ ” (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 54). Clients can be testy. One acidly remarks that he would prefer to ask the questions and have Jo answer them. Tonelessly, The Island Detective reminds Señor Wall that “ ‘it is almost always simpler to ask questions than to answer them’ ” (“The Black Sampan,” p. 97). And clients can be unacceptable: Miss Virginia Crale, for example. “ ‘Hysterical ladies are not pleasing in the tropics … [Her] life has been threatened so often, in her imagination, that her fees bored me beyond their value in cash’ ” (“The Man from Shanghai,” p. 116). In this instance she was right—Jo wrong. She is brutally murdered.

  Above all, Jo Gar is stubborn and a fighter, the more so the more his life is threatened. Arragon offers that maybe it would have been wiser if Jo had taken a sojourn from Manila.

  The Island Detective nodded. “I am like the cock Ramirez had at the Casa Club, two weeks ago,” he sa
id. “You remember—it was almost blind. It didn’t seem to know just where to leap. But it would not be beaten” (“Signals of Storm,” p. 44).

  Jo’s turf is Manila and its environs, although he sails to Nagasaki (Kyushu) on one venture, ends up in San Francisco on another, solves one up-country slaying, and one in Baguio (“Silence House”), the summer capital of the Philippines, 150 miles north of Manila, high in the mountains of western Luzon.

  Manila, before World War II, was a place where racial and ethnic slurs and invectives abounded, or so Decolta/Whitfield would have us believe, and I think accurately so.5 Distasteful as such reading may be today—and it is—derogatory remarks in print were perfectly acceptable in the 1930s, whatever the level of publication. We would be unwise to accuse Decolta/Whitfield of racial or ethnic prejudices; he presented Manila and its people as he saw them. In other words, his was an exercise in verisimilitude.6

  To be blunt, using Decolta/Whitfield’s language verbatim, Jo Gar is a half-breed; that is he has “ ‘the blood of the Spanish and the Filipino’ ” in his veins (“Diamonds of Death,” p. 90). Some half-dozen times in the Black Mask stories this comes up; twice Jo is called a half-breed, with modified adjectives, to his face (“Signals of Storm,” p. 51; “Diamonds of Death,” p. 90); twice Jo is obliquely disparaged (“Death in the Pasig,” pp. 104–105; “The Caleso Murders,” p. 98); twice Jo’s momentary companion is embarrassed because he goes too far. The Island Detective, always polite, handles himself impeccably. On a bridge over the Pasig, he talks about the apparent suicide of Gary Landon with an American, Dean Price, the actual murderer.

  “They’ve cut him down. White or—”