Raoul Whitfield

Raoul Whitfield (November 22, 1896 – January 24, 1945) was an American writer of adventure, aviation, and hardboiled crime fiction. During his writing career, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, Whitfield published over 300 short stories and serials in pulp magazines, as well as nine books, including Green Ice (1930) and Death in a Bowl (1931). For his novels and contributions to the Black Mask, Whitfield is considered one of the original members of the hard-boiled school of American detective fiction and has been referred as "the Black Mask's forgotten man".

By the mid-1930s, the amount of work Whitfield produced dropped substantially as he suffered what the Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw described as a "personal tragedy." Both his second and third wife died by suicide; in his later years, despite coming into money, Whitfield was broke and suffering from tuberculosis. He would die of the disease in 1945.