PULP ORIGINALS
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"I Remember It Well"
by Harry WhittingtonCourtesy of disc-us books inc: http://www.disc-us.com/profiles/whit_bio.htm
See below for The Dimes of Harry Whittington, published by Disc-us
My writing life has been a blast. With all the fallout, fragmentation, frustration and free falls known to man I've careened around on heights I never dreamed of, and simmered in pits I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and survived. Maybe it's just that I forget quickly and forgive easily.
Looking back, I find it perhaps less than total extravaganza. It all seemed so great at the time: Doing what I wanted to do, living as I wanted to live, having the time of my life and being paid for it. I worked hard; nobody ever wrote and sold 150-odd novels in 20 years without working hard, but I loved what I was doing. I gave my level best on absolutely every piece of my published work, for one simple reason: I knew of no other way to sell what I wrote.
I've known some wonderful people in the writing racket. For some years, I lived in a loose-knit community of real, hard working writers – Day Keene, Gil Brewer, Bill Brannon, Talmage Powell, Robert Turner, Fred C. Davis. Out in Hollywood, Sid Fleischman and Mauri Grashin are friends, as were Fred C. Fox, Elwood Ullman. And via mail, Frank Gruber, Carl Hodges, Milt Ozaki. Death flailed that company of gallants – Gruber, Fox, Hodges, Ullman, Keene, Gil Brewer, Brannon, Fred Davis – all gone. Talmage Powell's inimitable stories appear in anthologies and magazines and, as of this writing, as I did in the wild and wonderful fifties when we all were young and pretty, I persist.
The fifties. The magic. Time of change. Crisis. The end of the pulps and the birth of the "original" paperbacks. In recent years critic-writers, Bill Pronzini, Christopher Geist, Michael Barson and Bill Crider have kindly referred to me as king of the paperback pioneers. I didn't realize at the time I was a pioneer and I certainly didn't set out to be "king" of anything. I needed a fast-reporting, fast-paying market; the paperbacks provided this. I wrote 8, 10, 12 hours a day. Paperback editors bought and paid swiftly. We were good for each other.
The reason why I wrote and sold more than almost everybody else was that I was living on the edge of ruin, and I was naive.
James Cagney once said, "It's the naive people who become the true artists. First, they have to be naive enough to believe in themselves. Then, they must be naive enough to keep on going, using their talent, in spite of any kind of discouragement or doublecross. Pay no attention to setbacks, not even know a setback when it smites. Money doesn't concern them."
Money concerned me. I'd never have dared become a full-time writer if I'd known in the forties that the critically acclaimed "authors" I admired from afar were college professors, ad men, lawyers, reporters, dogcatchers or politicians by day. Fewer than 500 people in the U.S. make their living from full-time freelance writing. Since 1948, I've been precariously, one of fortune's 500. I persist.
Because, in 1948, 1 didn't know any better, I quit my government job of 16 years and leaped in, fully clothed, where only fools treaded water. I had a wife, two children and gimlet-eyed creditors standing at my shoulder. I had to write and I had to sell.
At that precise moment, the publishing world was being turned upside down by the Fawcett Publishing Company. When they lost a huge reprint paperback distribution client, they decided to do the unheard of, the insane. They published original novels at $.25 a copy. Print order on each title: 250,000. They paid writers not by royalty but on print order. Foreign, movie and TV rights remained with the writer. They were insane. They were my kind of people. Bill Lengel, Dick Carroll and later, Walter Fultz. Elegant men. One hell of a publishing company.
Jim Quinn at HandiBooks; Graphic, Mauri Latzen of Star, and Avon were all swift-remitting markets once the spillgates broke open. I wrote and they bought. Once Sid Fleischman wrote from Santa Monica: "Just came from the downtown newsstands. My God, Harry, you've taken them over."
It wasn't true. It just seemed true.
It wasn't all easy, not all beer and peanuts. There were rough times. You want dues paid?
I came to writing from a love of words. However, I wrote for at least 13 years before I truly learned to plot.I admired extravagantly Scott Fitzgerald's writings all through the `30s when almost everyone else had forgotten him or, if they remembered, thought he had died, along with prosperity, in 1929. I couldn't afford to buy The Great Gatsby, so I borrowed it over and over from the public library. I haunted used bookstores looking for old magazines in which Fitzgerald might appear.
I met a girl who bought for me – at one hell of an expense in the deepest Depression because they were out of print – all of Fitzgerald's books. I was so overcome with gratitude and joy and exultance that I married her. I still have her, and the books.
I spent at least seven years writing seriously and steadily before I sold anything. June 12, 1943, I sold a short-short story to United Features for $15. In the next couple years I sold them about 25 more 1000-worders, but it was five more years before I sold regularly. In that time, I worked for more than two years with a selfless, patient editor at Doubleday on a book they finally rejected. At this moment, Phoenix Press bought my first western novel, Vengeance Valley, July 10, 1946.
Using my navy GI bill, I studied writing. Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes. I understood plotting, emotional response, story structure. Fifteen years it took me to learn, but I knew. I could plot – forward, backwards, upside down. It was like being half-asleep and abruptly waking. Never again would I be stumped for plot idea or story line. From the moment I learned to plot, I was assaulted with ideas screaming, scratching and clawing for attention. For the next 20 years I sold everything I wrote. I enjoyed Cadillacs, Canoe cologne, cashmere, Hickey-Freeman jackets and charge accounts you would not believe.
I wrote suspense novels, contemporary romances, westerns, regional "backwoods" tales. People who wonder such things, wondered how I could crossover in these genres with such ease.
All very simple. I could write backwoods sagas because I came from mid-Florida when it was truly Kinnan-Rawlings territory. I could write "cattle-country" fiction because I lived in my teen years on a farm with cows. We had less than a hundred, but when you've known one cow, you've known a thousand. When you've hand-pumped ten-gallon tubs of water from a 100-foot well to fill those bellies, you know more than you need to know. I spent time on horseback, usually without a saddle. When I fell, as I frequently did, unsecured and fast-moving, that wonderful horse stopped in midstride and stood silently until I crawled back aboard. I didn't need to know a thousand horses, I just needed to love that one.
I never wrote westerns about "cowboys" or "indians" or "hold-up men." I wrote about people in a raw rugged land who loved, hated, feared and saw murder for what it was – murder. They got sick at the thought of using a gun. They used guns as you would in the same situation – as a last resort.There was much talk in the fifties about the writers who "lived" their suspense stories. I didn't write that kind of suspense story anyway. I wrote about people, their insides, their desires, and fears and hurts and joys of achievement and loss. I wrote about love which fired white hot and persisted against all odds, because I was fool enough then to believe – and I still believe – that true love does persist, does not alter when it alteration finds. It may buckle in the middle sometimes, but it does not bend with the remover to remove.
If a character hurt in his guts, I wrote to make you feel how bad he hurt. I knew about emotional pain, which is the worst kind, and about physical pain. I was in two fights. In one, I got my front teeth smashed loose. In the other, overmatched, I was struck sharply in each temple by fists with third knuckle raised like a knot. When I wrote about pain, I knew what I was talking about. You don't have to die in a fire to write truly about arson.
How I came to write suspense stories is something else. Bill Brannon, in Chicago, said he could sell all the suspense novelettes – about 10,000 words each – I could write.
Since I wanted only to be Scott Fitzgerald, with a touch of sardonic Maugham and J.P. McEvoy humor, I told Bill I hated suspense stories, never read them, and certainly couldn't write them. But I was in Chicago attending a writers' conference when I said that.Having no idea what hellish jokes fate had stored up for me, I caught the bus home from Chicago – 36 hours of leaving the driving to them. I was hemmed in against a window by a lady who looked like a giant-economy sized Nell Carter. In an attempt to escape, my mind plotted out the first suspense story I'd ever attempted. I got home on a Monday, wrote the story that night and mailed it the next day to Bill. That Friday I got a check from King Features Syndicate for $250. For at least 20 years I got small royalty checks from King Features on the 30 novelettes I did for them starting in 1949.
My path had been chosen for me. Fredric Pohl, who was an agent then, sold my first western novelette to Mammoth Western, "Find This Man With Bullets." Bill Brannon sold my suspense novel, Slay Ride For A Lady to Jim Quinn at Handibooks. I was on my way. I was less than a household name, but I was too busy, and having too much fun, to care. The people who read my books said I was a good writer, a damned good writer. How could I argue with that?
The New York Times, July 18, 1954: "Whittington does the best sheer story telling since the greatest pre-sex days of the detective pulps. . . You'll Die Next is a very short novel, which is just as well. I couldn't have held my breath any longer in this vigorous tale whose plot is too dexteriously twisted even to mention in a review."
Baby, I could plot!
From Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (Paris Edition) 1958: "Man In The Shadow – Whittington's style is uncommonly lean and bare – it must have been difficult for the adapter to get his tone for French readers. But the impact is vigorous, the craftsmanship so smooth that one identifies with these characters, in their anxieties, their furies, their indignation, their rebelling against injustice, so we fully recommend this book to you."
And Le Monde, the largest newspaper of Paris, 1957: "With this novel, Frenzie Pastorale (Desire in the Dust), which compares favorably with Erskine Caldwell's best, Whittington asserts himself as one of the greats among American novelists." You can imagine how I blushed.
Nov. 4, 1955, the New York Times: "In The Humming Box, Whittington once again proves himself one of the most versatile and satisfactory creators of contemporary fiction – tightly told, recalling the best of early James M. Cain."
"Saddle The Storm, is one of the top six westerns of this year," said the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Western Writers of America voted Saddle The Storm number one of the 10 best paperback westerns of 1954.
Fifteen of my novels sold to motion pictures. Three television series were based on my books.
I was living high. One of the few people doing exactly what I wanted to do. In 1957, Warner Brothers hired me to write a screenplay from my western novel Trouble Rides Tall for Gary Cooper. I couldn't write an adaptation that excited them. Finally, my option was dropped, the project became LAWMAN, a TV series starring John Russell and Peter Brown which ran about five years.
I had contracted the movie virus in Hollywood. I returned to Florida, wrote, produced and directed – and could not sell to a distributor – a horror film called Face of the Phantom.
For the next eight years I could not produce or sell enough scripts to stay ahead of howling creditors. My agent decided I must do only nonfiction – things like "How I Made a Million in Florida Real Estate" – though I knew or cared nothing about the subject. He rejected out of hand the next five novels I submitted, then when I sold them myself, he demanded his ten percent because the books had once been in his office. He even wrote letters to editors threatening to sue if they bought my work except through him. I went to court and six months later I was free of him. But I had to write true confessions under my wife's name in order to keep my son in college during the long fight.
I signed, in 1964, to do a 60,000-word novel a month for a publisher under his house names. I was paid $1000. On the first of each month. I wrote one of these novels a month for 39 months. At the same time I was Robert Hart Davis, doing several 30,000-word novels for Man-from-Uncle Magazine. Strange thing happened at Gold Medal. Walter Fultz called with the great news that my novel Don't Speak To Strange Girls had at first reporting sold 85 percent and was certain for immediate reprintings. Instead, nothing happened and Fawcett, which had been since 1950 like family, suddenly rejected everything I submitted. Walter Fultz even wrote a nice letter apologizing. The next thing Fawcett published by me was the novelization Fall of the Roman Empire for which I "was the only writer for the job."
Desert Stakeout went into six printings for Gold Medal once they did business with me again. Charro was reprinted five times.
The novel a month with the other work I was trying to do, plus the tensions and the debts, exhausted me. Emotionally. Mentally. Physically. I cried at weather reports. Then came the coup de grace. My new agent got me an assignment to do an original novel using the characters from the TV series MAN FROM UNCLE. The publisher had issued 30 of my novels and said he'd done well indeed. I'd always had royalty contracts from him. Now he wanted to pay $1500 for outright purchase of all rights.
What in hell happened to me? Wasn't I the same writer who'd been giving the best he knew for 20 years? The agent advised me to accept. But he and the publisher knew what I didn't know. Mike Avallone had written the first Man From Uncle novel. It had sold at least a million copies and Mike was bleeding in rage.
So now it was my turn. I signed the contract. I wrote the book. I saw it on the Chicago Tribune paperback best seller list for one full year and I, who owed my shirt, made $1500 on a book that would easily have paid off all I owed and more.
I wanted to go on, pay no attention to setbacks, overlook discouragement or doublecross. With all my heart I wanted to, but I was too tired, too disappointed, too depleted.
So, sadly, I closed up shop. I still loved to write, but nobody cared, nobody wanted me. I figured if I were less than nothing to one of my most consistent publishers, I had come to a low place indeed. I had come by winding roads to the place where an agent and publisher conspired to use me for money the IRS wouldn't let them keep anyway.
I threw away every unsold script, put my books in storage. I quit. I asked for a job as an editor in the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, and they hired me for Rural Electrification Administration.
I had reached the low place where writing lost its delight, the place where I refused to go on. No working writer knew more about plotting than I. Fifteen years it took me to learn. Twenty years I practiced. I was a damn good writer. I knew what made a scene real, what made a heart break or a reader respond. But I also knew nobody gave a damn.
For seven years, I worked in the government. I did sell three books in seven years because I felt guilty when I wasn't at my typewriter. What else was I? What else did I know?
In 1974, my wife – that same girl who bought out-of-print Scott Fitzgerald for me in 1935 – got the name and address of literary agent Anita Diamant. Want a plot gimmick? She got Anita's address from Bill Brannon who'd sold my first suspense stories in 1947.
Mrs. Diamant arranged for me to become Ashley Carter. Since 1975, I've written the Falconhurst and Blackoaks novels, the antebellum slave stories of the Mandingo slaves done by Kyle Onstott and then Lance Horner.
Then I learned that during those seven years of exile, I hadn't been totally forgotten. Jean-Jacques Schleret, a French critic of Strasbourg, wrote to my Hollywood agent, Mauri Grashin, to learn when Whittington had died since there had been no Whittington suspense novel in France since 1968.
The Magazine Litteraire (Paris) wrote: "For the past 25 years, we in France have considered Whittington one of the masters of the romain noir in the second generation – after Hammett, Chandler, Cain of the first generation . . . his novel Brute In Brass is one of the finest of the genre ever written . . . . "
Gallimard, which had published my books in Serie Noire now was reprinting them in Carre Noir. The French equivalent of the Mystery Writers of America, 813, Les Amis Du Crime, published a book devoted to my work.
The 813 and the Maison d'Andre Malraux invited Kathryn and me as Guest of Honor at the Fourth Festival of Suspense Novels and Films at Reims in Oct. 1982. Along with Evan Hunter, I was the first American writer to be invited to join 813. I was treated with such kindness and love and awe and attention that the entire celebration seems more dream than reality.
It was all an elegant and brilliant party. The French were the kindest hosts on earth. Jean-Jacques Schleret, Jean Paul Schweighaeuser, Rafael Sorin, Stephane Bourgoin, Francois Gerif and Robert Louit, all wrote glowingly of my work.
Back home in America Bill Crider, Bill Pronzini, Michael Barson and others praised my old suspense and western novels.
I wasn't dead after all.
This spontaneous outpouring of affection and warmth in France and here at home restored my old lost excitement and enthusiasms. It was like plodding for a long time in lonely night wind and coming suddenly upon a bright and festive place loud with love and laughter.
Rafael Sorin, writing in Le Monde, Paris: "(Whittington) . . .this prolific writer of more than 140 novels is largely unappreciated. He holds, nevertheless, an honorable position among that intermediate generation of the American suspense novel alongside David Goodis, Don Tracy and Wm. Campbell Gault. Even the most minor of Whittington's earliest narratives reread today does not fail to charm. Whittington, who acknowledges the influences of Cain, Fredric Davis and Day Keene is the most violent writer of this genre. His tomb of death can be the appliance freezer, alligators, mosquitoes carrying fatal virus. But his worst enemy is la femme. She who kills for money and devours those who succumb to her charms . . . . Whittington, who appeared pictured in his early books to be a rebellious young turk, arrives at Reims looking like a casting director's dream – ideal of the well-fed, successful TV lawyer . . . "
The West Coast Review of Books in 1979 awarded Porgys to my Rampage as "best contemporary novel" and Panama as "best historical novel based on fact." Who's Who In America decided to include me in their august pages. Twentieth Century Crime & Suspense Writers were most flattering as was Twentieth Century Western Writers.
Aroused by affection to optimism and resolution again, I could even remember the good which had accrued in the worst of times: The night at the Mystery Writers Award Dinner when I was introduced to Howard Browne, then executive editor at Mammoth Western. Howard greeted me, "My God, I'm glad to meet you. My chief editor Lila Shaffer says you're the most exciting new writer she's read. Better get a lot of material in to her fast. You've got a real fan there."
Or Harry Stephen Keeler, in his 80s and still selling his convoluted mysteries, writing in those years when sex in books was two passionate sighs, two loosened buttons and three asterisks: "Whittington is the only writer I know who can make a sex scene last for six pages without ever going out of bounds."
Or that most caring and selfless lady literary agent of Copenhagen who wrote, deeply troubled, in the midst of my 1960 battle to be free of an agent who admittedly planned to destroy me: "I cannot believe this man would risk losing your great talent for writing by his insensitive and selfish behavior. I have taken the liberty of writing to five New York agents (names and addresses enclosed) who each promise me they would welcome you, with sensitivity, caring and support, as a client."
It's been a wonderful life and I've met some wonderful people, it's been one hell of a roller-coaster ride.
Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: "There are no second acts in America." Maybe he was right. Maybe not. Maybe the trick is to hang in there – until after the intermission.
And, before we part, a few words about this book before you and the others selected for this classic-suspense-novel revival that constitutes this Black Lizard series. (Publisher's note: Six of these titles are republished by Disc-us as The Dime Stories of Harry Whittington; The Devil Wears Wings, available here, was also included in the Black Lizard selection - see below).
Questions most often asked: Why did you write a particular novel, how long did it take to write it, where'd you get the idea for it and, where do you get your ideas?
First, my story germs are contracted differently than those of some of the leading practitioners of suspense and mystery, and even western, writing. Several stellar-performer-writers have averred on TV and other public dais that they start to write with no idea where they're going, or how their tale will resolve itself. One famous gentleman, writing for beginning writers, said he rewrote the ending of one book several times before making it come out right.
Despite the protestations of these best-selling writers, I personally find this lack of planning wasteful, unprofessional, and worst, even amateurish. Sometimes, I realize it's said to sound artistic. Still, it's much like setting out in a billion-dollar shuttle for outer space with no flight plan. Head for the moon, but if you land on Mars, what the hell? It's like a magician's walking on stage without knowing if he will draw rabbit or dove or anything at all out of his hat. In my world of writing at least, suspense is for the reader, not the writer. I can't believe bridges are built without minute preparations, or that Donald Trump okays a new tower which might turn out to look like the World Trade Center or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disney World.
I usually start at the crisis, climax or dramatic denouement of my story, even if it's sparked by some unusual scene, character, situation or speculation. A story is not about "an innocent man framed by his own government" but how – with what special, carefully foreshadowed strength, skill, knowledge or character trait – he overcomes this terrifying situation. That "planting" and a preconceived "emotional effect" which will gratify, shock and involve the reader is truly what the novel is all about. Or, as Mickey Spillane said, "The first page sells the book being read, the last page sells the one you're writing."
Once a writer sets in his own mind "how" a story-line will be resolved, he is then freed to torment, tease, terrify or tantalize his audience. Alfred Hitchcock called this story core "the McGuffin," Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures called it the "wiener." I call it the key, the complication factor, the gimmick.
Don't take my word for it. Let me quote Edgar Allan Poe who wrote, in reviewing Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales: "A skillful artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents but, having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or SINGLE EFFECT (caps mine) to be brought out, he then (italics mine) invents such incidents, he then combines such effects as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not in the pre-established design. And by such means, and with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed . . . . "
And I believe a good cabinet-maker can build a cabinet without rebuilding it forty-seven times. And I suggest he likely lays out his entire plan before he starts to build.
Having said this, I immediately stipulate that some of these writers who embark boldly with only nebulous idea, dramatic first scene or unusual character, have sold more books than Poe and I combined (and including Nathaniel Hawthorne). I still hold to my battered barricades. I still don't want to put myself in the untenable position where, when all else fails, I must resort to God in the machinery or "come to realize."
Anyhow, once I have worked out a "plot key" which will unlock my mystery, I know where I am going, even if I don't know how I will get there. I wish I could illustrate with examples of "plot keys" from these present novels without destroying your pleasure in them in advance, but I am sure you will discover them for yourself and, best of all, you won't be abandoned with the sense that the "outcome" was thrown in from left field. The climax will be carefully planted and foreshadowed, which is simply a matter of sweat and blood and hard work called "plotting."
French critics have noted that my heroes all are "disillusioned knights in rusted armor, often at battle with the very forces which employed them in the first place." I had no idea, as I wrote, that this was true, but in the face of so much evidence, I must concede. No one of my heroes is ever permitted, by his own disenchanted sanity, to believe in the sanity of the social "order" around him. For example, a nation in which an administration bases its policy on industrial/military complex greed, can talk blandly the insanity of "winning a nuclear war," insists upon sixteen thousand atomic warheads when three will be more than sufficient, and spend billions on it while refusing crumbs to dependent children and closing the Library of Congress at 5 P.M. daily; perhaps because that leadership got where it is by having never read more than three books in its combined life span and wishing to provide every youth that same opportunity. My hero cannot put on the happy face. He is pushed to the place where he can trust only himself, even when he recognizes the impossible odds he faces. This does not stop him because he would rather die fighting than to surrender to greed, corruption and mean-heartedness, which places him as often at war with himself as with the uncompassionate and cynical power structure.
I often quoted Forgive Me, Killer as answer to those who wanted to know how long it took me to write one of my suspense novels – and what delayed me?With Forgive Me, Killer, the answer is either four years or one month. I make no attempt to resolve the question, I simply state the facts: On March 8, 1952, I signed a contract with Fawcett Gold Medal for a novel (in outline) called My Bloody Hands. Nothing went right. It was planned as a novel about a crooked cop named Mike Ballard who is gut-sick of corruption and his own smell of evil. He tries to atone for and redress the wrongs of his rotten city. But, as I wrote, I and Bill Lengel and Richard Carroll at Gold Medal saw it lacked something. One knew from the outset what the end would be. They had paid me a $1000 advance which they told me to keep and to get to work on something else.
By 1956, I was still stewing over that Mike Ballard novel and getting no answers. I accompanied a friend to a prison to interview an inmate for a True Detective article. When we arrived in late afternoon, we walked through a vaguely illumined, vast tomb-like auditorium where, far down front, the prison orchestra was rehearsing.
With this strange, eerie picture in mind, everything suddenly fell into place for the long abandoned novel: its mood, tempo, structure, complication gimmick, everything. Mike Ballard was no longer a disgusted cop but a man on the take and content with status quo. Don't ask me why, because I don't know, but when I returned home, I started anew and in about a month had finished the Mike Ballard novel. I now called it Hell Can't Wait, Gold Medal called it Brute In Brass, the French publisher Gallimard called it Vingt-Deux and many French critics called it "one of the best of the romain noir genre ever written."
Did I write Forgive Me, Killer in four weeks, or did it take four long years? Whatever, I hope you find it intriguing.
Fires That Destroy was written to the classic mold of "character proof." (Becky Sharp's selfish ambition in Vanity Fair is the best example). You establish your character with a strong (even obsessive) character trait and I then prove that trait when in a crisis the character has the opportunity to be something more or less than the inner drive prodding him. When he behaves "in character" no matter the cost, his trait has been proved. I am betraying no secrets when I tell you my protagonist, Bernice, wanted above everything else to be regarded with the esteem and respect shown the loveliest of women. How she is given that attention and proves her trait is the story of this novel.
The hero – and he is one of my few truly unblemished heroes – in A Ticket To Hell is indeed the battered knight tilting against terrible odds and for no promise of reward. This does not stop him from fighting for what he wants – a truly disenchanted knight in rusted armor with only what he is inside, and an old longlost love he cannot recover, to sustain him.
Web Of Murder, on the other hand, is one of those sweetly plotted novels Day Keene, Fred Davis and James Cain used to concoct. We start the protagonist almost casually down the road to Hades and then follow him on every cruel twist and turn through increasing terror to the pit beyond hell. The reviewer who said Web of Murder "proves that the death penalty may not be the worst punishment" exactly expressed the key to this novel. If you have half the fun reading it that I had writing it, we've got something going here.
The events in The Devil Wears Wings are totally true and documented. This botched, bourbon-laced crime was one I wrote for editor Joe Corona at Fawcett's True Detective. But I could not get this tragic-comedy out of my mind, so I structured the true events enough to give them form, a beginning, middle, end and desired emotional effect.
The novel here titled A Moment To Prey had a history almost as varied as its titles. When I wrote it, I called it Never Find Sanctuary, which Gold Medal changed to Backwoods Tramp and which the publisher Gallimard, of Paris, called Le Chant D'Alligator. It is one of my favorites. But I suppose a writer is like a proud parent: among his children he has none but favorites.
Harry Whittington — August 1986
Copyright © Harry Whittington
After selling his first short story to United Features for $15 in 1943, Harry Whittington went on to write crime, suspense, western, and romance novels under his own name and such pseudonyms as Whit Harrison, Hallam Whitney, Harry White, Kell Holland, Clay Stuart, Harriet Kathryn Myers, Robert Hart Davis, Tabor Evans, Blaine Stevens, Clay Stuart, Hondo Wells and Ashley Carter.
Harry Whittington died in 1990 at age 75.
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The Dimes of Harry Whittington are available from Amazon, and are published by Disc-us books inc. The three volumes (each containing two books) are:
The DIMES OF HARRY WHITTINGTON, Volume One: Web of Murder and A Moment to Prey
Feverishly plotted, deliciously perverse, Web of Murder is Double Indemnity on steroids.
A Moment to Prey features Lily, a woman looking for a man to take her away from the dirt road and one-room shack she called home.
The DIMES OF HARRY WHITTINGTON, Volume Two: Fires That Destroy and A Ticket to Hell
Fires that Destroy is a relentless, revealing search into the soul of a woman.
The hero of A Ticket to Hell is indeed a battered knight tilting against terrible odds and for no promise of reward.
The DIMES OF HARRY WHITTINGTON, Volume Three: Forgive Me Killer and You’ll Die Next
Forgive Me Killer is a hard novel of a crooked cop desperate to atone for previous sins.
You'll Die Next grabs you by the throat and keeps you turning the pages as fast as you can through its breathless plot."One of the greats among American novelists." - Le Monde
"Whittington does some of the best sheer story-telling since the greatest days of the detective pulps." - NY Times
READ CHAPTER OF THE DEVIL WEARS WINGS BUY THE DEVIL WEARS WINGS
READ JASON STARR'S INTRODUCTION TO HARRY WHITTINGTON
Link to: Crimeculture Noir Originals
