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Yellow Kid Weil Aut 00 Weil
Yellow Kid Weil Aut 00 Weil
The days of the hard-working pulp writer might be over, but the
hammering out stories for which he or she is paid by the word, is still a
romantic one. These days fiction writers are lucky if their work nets
before the internet, when television was in its infancy, before the decline
paper was cheap and there was still a functioning working class, writers
few were able to succeed in that world. Harry Whittington was certainly
one of them. Over the course of four decades, he made a living churning
was well-versed in the market and how to write for it. From reading the
of both plot and those who inhabit the plot. Perhaps he sensed that it’s
the plot that turns the pages, but it’s the characters who leave a lasting
and the incident could have come straight from one of writer-
Whittington’s novels- was the last of his kind. From the early 1950s to
Colman, John Dexter, Kel Holland, Blaine Stevens and Suzanne Stephens.
Whittington novels like The Devil Wears Wings, Fires That Destroy, A
Moment to Prey and A Ticket to Hell are tense affairs, with knuckle-
crunching dialogue. But even though companies like Black Lizard, Stark
House and 280 Steps have reprinted several of his best novels,
Whittington has never achieved the same status as Hammett or Cain, nor
Anatole France, who wrote about the world as they saw it, and knew how
to create complex narratives that could twist and turn in any direction.
It’s ironic that Whittington, given his love for these more literary types,
make writing his life, was willing to take his accolades and paychecks
wherever he could get them. This after putting in more than a decade in
and pulp magazine market. Unable to find a publisher for his first novel,
Balzac, and maybe, in a way, he was. At least in so far as they wrote for a
living and knew the importance of simply telling a good story. And, even
the more he would come to respect others who wrote for that market. In
his essay, “I Remember It Well,” which prefaces the Black Lizard reprints
of his work, he cites Day Keene, Gil Brewer, Talmage Powell and Fred
Davis, who also wrote by the word, putting in eight to ten hours a day in
Whittington claimed he’d taught Brewer and Keene everything they knew
Whittington everything they knew about writing. Probably they had all
when he began publishing in the late 1940s that most successful writers
dog catchers or politicians. Not entirely true, but his point is well taken.
Many successful writers had other jobs and, unlike Whittington, didn’t
might have been, but nothing was going to hold Whittington back.
would be seven years before he sold his first story, to United Features in
1943 for $15. It would still be another five years before he could sell
notion of writing crime and suspense stories had he not attended a 1949
were the very stories publishers were looking for. On the bus journey
Monday, wrote the story that night, posted it on Tuesday, and by Friday
had a check for $250 from King Features, a long-standing Hearst outlet.
into the beast that was the burgeoning paperback market. Companies
like Fawcett, who paid writers “not by royalty but on print order. Foreign,
movie and TV rights stayed with the author. They were insane.” It was a
business model that seemed to work, at least for the likes of Whittington
and Brewer. No matter that they drove themselves into the ground trying
to fit into that system, which had the potential of paying well, however
promises that were difficult to keep, some would turn to alcohol or pills.
plot, baby. I could plot.” More importantly, he could also now sell
practically anything he wrote, and live well off the proceeds. Believing
range of experiences and knowledge of various locales that fit the sort
of writing he was doing. Though he wanted to make the reader feel what
his characters felt, he had the wherewithal to move outside his own
knows. As he said, “you don’t have to die in a fire to write about arson.”
part of a team. Even so, his treatment for Trouble Rides Tall with Gary
Cooper became a TV series, The Lawman. While IMDB lists ten film
credits associated with his name: from the short The Wonderful World of
Dakotas; and films like Desire In the Dust (1960, based on his novel),
Black Gold (1962, based on his story), Adios Gringo (1965, based on his
novel Adios), Fireball (1969), Dead in the Water (1991, based on his novel
Web of Murder). Undeterred, Whittington returned to Florida where he
wrote, produced and directed The Face of the Phantom, a horror movie
no distributor wanted to take on. For the next eight years, Whittington
because they have been difficult to track down. Published under various
aficionado David Laurence Wilson, pretty much all of these books have
now been accounted for). Around this time he was also contacted to
write a series of tie-in novels based on The Man From Uncle under the
name Robert Hart-Davis, for which he was paid $1500. Not surprisingly,
Though even during his eight year tenure with the Department he
his wife, located a new agent who, after suggesting he change to writing
Kyle Onstott and, then, Lance Horner, as well as at least seven in the
Blackoaks series, about a Mandingo slave, and six Longarm westerns
stand back to let his material crystallize on its own. For example, having
about a crooked cop fed up with the corruption around him, including his
own. However, he and his editors knew the novel wasn’t quite right, so
Fawcett told him to keep the advance and work on something else. Four
years later, while visiting a prison with a friend who was interviewing
but a citizen on the take and content to keep on doing so. So he went
home, changed the title, and, over the next month, finished the novel,
would say he was never sure if Forgive Me Killer took one month or four
teasing and terrifying the reader, while establishing the plot that would
unlock the story. Consequently, the novel’s shape would dictate its
effect. Whittington liked to quote Spillane: “The first page sells the book
being read, the last page sells the one you’re writing.”
For someone so intensely involved in the writing process,
his own disenchanted sanity, to believe in the sanity of the social order
protagonists have only themselves to rely upon, and their true selves
pushed to the place where he can trust only himself, even when he
him, the latter calling him a “master of the roman noir,” and the best of
Gallimard’s Serie Noire, beginning with You’ll Die Next (Carré Noir) in
1954, followed by the likes of Hell Can Wait, published in 1956, four years
before it appeared in the U.S., and The Humming Box in 1957. And from
and Day Keene is the most violent writer of this genre. His tomb of death
But his worst enemy is la femme. She who kills for money and devours
writing in the New York Times of You’ll Die Next: “I couldn’t have held my
breath any longer in this vigorous tale whose plot is too dexterously
Harry Stephen Keeler, who said, “Whittington is only writer I know who
can make a sex scene last six pages without ever going out of bounds.”
But it would only be in the 1980s, thanks to Black Lizard, that his novels
Forgive Me, Killer, The Devil Wears Wings, Fires That Destroy, A Moment
acknowledging his influence and the quality of his work began to appear
outlets and few if any that can pay the same rates, if at all. Likewise,
would seek to travel down that road. Even back in the 1980s
fewer than “500 people in the U.S. make their living from full-time
freelance writing,” which made him, since 1948, one of “fortune’s 500.”
and survived.”
died in 1989 at age 74, might yet receive the recognition he clearly
Night For Screaming, he could begin “with a tense situation and then dial
up the tension on every succeeding page. He can put his protagonist into
a situation that seems as bad as it can get, and then he can make it
Cain. And even though he never did become the next Fitzgerald, when it
came to hardboiled noir, Whittington, at his best, was as good as anyone