And, even though he hoped to be the next Scott Fitzgerald “with a touch of Maugham,” the more Whittington moved in the direction of pulp fiction, the more he would come to respect others who wrote for that market. At least in so far as they wrote for a living and knew the importance of simply telling a good story. No doubt he would have loved to have been a Dostoyevsky or Balzac, and maybe, in a way, he was. Unable to find a publisher for his first novel, The World Before Us, he turned to westerns, publishing Vengeance Valley in 1944. No overnight success, Whittington set his sights on the paperback and pulp magazine market. 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 gained the same cult following as Thompson and Goodis. 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. In churning out his high-octane books, he deployed over twenty noms-des-plumes: Whit Harrison (for suspense and westerns), Clay Stuart (southern novels), Steve Philips (police procedurals), Hondo Wells (westerns), Tabor Evans (westerns), Harriet Kathryn Myers (nurse romances), Hallam Whitney (southern novels), Ashley Carter (southern historical- Falconhurst series), Harry White (westerns), as well as Howard Winslow, Henry Whittier, Curt Colman, John Dexter, Kel Holland, Blaine Stevens and Suzanne Stephens. From the early 1950s to the mid-1980s he might have been the hardest working writers in Noirville, racking-up some 180 novels. Whittington- not the Harry Whittington wounded by former VP Cheney in that famous quail-hunting incident, though that Whittington and the incident could have come straight from one of writer-Whittington’s novels- was the last of his kind.

Strange Bargain by Harry Whittington