While I’m not a fan of the hard-boiled detective genre, I recently obtained West of Guam: The Complete Cases of Jo Gar by Raoul Whitfield (1896–1945).
This reprints a series starring “Island detective” Jo Gar. He is a Spanish-Filipino living in Manila who is a former policeman, now a private investigator who often gets involved in cases involving murder. As this is a hard-boiled detective series, crimes are usually resolved by Gar having to trick the villain into exposing himself. We often don’t learn the full story of what is going on until the end, when it’s all revealed to us.
Raoul Whitfield was a fairly prolific pulp writer, though his output dropped in the mid-1930s. He is considered one of the creators of the hard-boiled genre. As a youth, he lived in the Philippines when his father worked there for the Territorial government, which was obviously the basis for this series.
He had other series in Black Mask and wrote the Jo Gar series under the name “Ramon Decolta,” which then allowed for more of his stories to appear in an issue. Steeger Books has two other collections of his in their Black Mask Library. We also get the interior artwork. I’m not sure of the source of the cover, as the character was not cover-featured, but it’s a good choice, as this is kind of how I imagine Jo Gar looking with his Colt pistol and his hat.
The Jo Gar series lasted about two dozen stories in Black Mask from 1930 to 1933, with two more stories appearing in Cosmopolitan a few years later. Each is a short story or novelette. Six would comprise a later novel, The Rainbow Diamonds. Because they are so short, there are very few continuing characters. Jo has an office, but no secretary. In the earlier stories we have Lt. Juan Arragon of the Manila Police, who is a friend and somewhat rival in the crimes Jo deals with. Also in many of those earlier stories there is Arnold Carlysle, the American head of the Manila Police. In later stories, they are replaced by Lt. Sati Ratan and Major Kelvey.
In the first story, “West of Guam,” we find Jo Gar returning to Manila on a US troop transport ship with a few other civilians. An officer is found dead, shot, but clearly not a suicide. Gar, as a detective, is asked to look into it. He is able to figure out the crime and expose the murderer. The next stories are similar. “Diamonds of Dread” starts the six-story sequence comprising The Rainbow Diamonds. A gang pulls off a daring robbery, taking a group of 10 diamonds. But in the process, they murder the jeweler’s son and a bank guard. Escaping in three cars, they are being pursued, one by Lt. Arragon.
Later, Gar finds Arragon in his office, dead. And it appears he left a note. Carlysle and some of his men go there, but it’s a trap. The jeweler and the diamond owner want Jo Gar to track down and obtain the diamonds and bring the gang to justice. This is a trip that will take Gar to Hawaii first and then San Francisco. Along the way, he will face several foes, but slowly retrieve most of the diamonds. It won’t be until the end that he finds and exposes the man behind it all, and that there was more behind it than just stealing some diamonds.
While these are not the type of detective stories I normally go for, they are all entertaining and exciting. Jo Gar is an interesting character in his own right. He deals with some very nasty people at times. If you want to move beyond that type of detective story, this is one to get into.
In addition to the stories, we get some great bonus material as well. There are two very good articles providing information on Whitfield and Jo Gar by scholar E.R. Hagemann. These appeared in The Armchair Detective in the 1980s. There is also an article about Professor Hagemann by a colleague, Dr. R.H. Miller.
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