One of the most popular and prolific contributors to the pulp magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s and a pioneer of the hard-boiled genre, Raoul Whitfield is now all but forgotten. In his brief writing career, using three names, Whitfield published more than 150 stories and 9 books of hard-boiled fiction and juvenile aviation adventures. Relentlessly violent and often oppressively bleak and cynical, his hard-boiled tales bear traces of his prewriting career as an actor, pilot, and reporter, as well as his travels as a child.

A nephew of the steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, Raoul Fauconnier Whitfield was born, an only child, into a financially and socially privileged family on 22 November 1898 in New York City, where he spent most of his early childhood. While still a boy he moved to the Philippines with his father, who had accepted a position in the Territorial Government in Manila. During...