Raoul Whitfield was born on November 22, 1896 in New York City. During World War I he served as an ambulance driver and in the air service. He later worked in a steel mill, as a bond salesman and a newspaper reporter. While a reporter, he began writing pulp stories for such magazines as Sport Story, War Stories, Air Trails, Boy' Life and Black Mask. Whitfield used his newspaper experience as the background for his first novel, Green Ice, in 1930. He went on to create the first hardboiled Hollywood detective in Death in a Bowl as well as Spanish-Filipino island detective Jo Gar under the pseudonym Ramon Decolta. After a very prolific career, he effectively stopped writing in the mid‐30s. Whitfield was married three times, most famously to Emily Davies Vanderbilt Thayer, who supposedly died by suicide. And though fairly wealthy for a time, Whitfield spent money quickly and died broke, a victim of tuberculosis in Los Angeles on January 24, 1945.