West of Guam: The Complete Cases of Jo Gar Paperback – May 11, 2013

Jo Gar is a half breed Filipino Detective who's real name may or may not be Jose Garcia. Jo Gar is smallish man who walks the mean streets of Manila. Set in then current 1930's Manila in the Philippines. Manila is a hub of the shipping world and home of a collection of the seediest characters gathered from all corners of the globe: Crooks, Cutthroats, Murders, Gamblers, Hookers, and Drug DealersRaoul Whitfield burst on to the Pulp Scene in 1926. Over the next 8 years Raoul wrote 87 stories for Black Mask Pulp Magazine. Of these stories his Jo Gar stories are some of his best. Raoul worked along side Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet. Together they created the Hard Boiled, Hard Bitten Detective. Jo Gar is Whitfield's best and longest running character on par with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. But the unique setting gives these tales a very interesting twistThis collection contains all 26 Jo Gar stories published from 1930 to 1936. 24 stories from Black Mask and the last two from Hearst's International Cosmopolitan. Two of the novelettes are tied together and involve a trip to Nagasaki, Japan. Another six stories fit together nicely as a whole novel called The Rainbow Murders. You get over 530 pages of story, 30 some pages of excellent introductions and afterwords and all the original pulp illustrations.I have two very small complaints. First in HR Hageman's introduction it lists page numbers of the source material it is citing. In most of these cases the page numbers do not match up. I assume they are from the earlier edition of the book and should have been corrected. Secondly I would like an artist credit for the excellent Cover used. Arthur Roman Bowker gets credit for the interior illustrations. I would have liked the same credit for the cover.Over all this is an Excellent and Beautiful Book from Matt Morring and his Altus Press. Large Trade Size on crisp white paper with easy to read type. I don't think you can call yourself a fan of Hard Boiled or Crime Noir Fan and not own this book. It doesn't come much better then this.My Highest Recommendation.

This MASSIVE volume, containing all the twenty six shorter works featuring the Filipino Detective Jo Gar, as well as several interesting articles written by and on Raoul Whitfield - is a treasure for all those who appreciate the hardboiled genre. However, these stories were different from the 'Have Gun, Will Shoot' varieties usually found in magazines featuring such works. They were also different from Hammett's or Chandler's version of crime and punishment.These stories revolved around things happening in a rather cosmopolitan Pacific between the two World Wars. They featured Jo Gar, a half-breed island detective who is gentle, ironic, nuanced, and incredibly persevering. He doesn't swagger, and in many cases practically sleepwalks through the investigation in the face of taunts and betrayals, coming alive only when the climax approaches. Death is thrown at him on a regular basis, and he returns those 'favours' with interest.I enjoyed these stories. They almost made me feel like reading crime capers in a tropical place with fan rotating above, and a glass of lemonade by my side. However, there are only two aspects of these stories which somewhat riled me. They were:(a) Perhaps due to space-related constraints, a single story has been broken down into shorter pieces by the author, and they have been presented as different stories herein. These had jarring effects on me. For example, 'Nagasaki Bound' and 'Nagasaki Knives' make up only one story. More importantly, 'Diamonds of Dread', 'The Man in White', 'The Blind Chinese', 'Red Dawn', 'Blue Glass', and 'Diamonds of Death' - these are nothing but episodes of a novella. In it, Senor Gar goes after the robbers who had looted a shop and killed several people including his friend and comrade Lieutenant Juan Arragon of Manila Police. His quest is to avenge that death, and he goes after the killers like the hand of fate - gentle but inevitable. These episodes were worthy of being framed into a novel.(b) The stories kept repeating certain stereotypes, perhaps befitting the times, but were rather tiresome to read now.Nevertheless, these were very enjoyable stories, written with a sympathy for Asian lifestyle and the unique way of thinking that marks its law enforcement. That is rare even now, and you can imagine how exotic the stories were to the readers of the Black Mask!Recommended.

I had no idea that Raoul Whitfield would turn out to be this good. As I was reading this book, I found myself thinking, multiple times, of how this work could be so little known -- this guy is just one step behind Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories (which for me are best in class, of their kind). I've loved Sherlock Holmes since I was young, and re-read the entire canon back in 2004 - 2005. The Jo Gar stories, to me, read more like Sherlock Holmes re-imagined in the Philippines than Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Hammett's Sam Spade (or Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, or any of the other classic American hard-boiled private eyes). The atmosphere and scene-painting by Whitfield is redolent of both the authenticity of a writer who lived it (which Whitfield did), and of a time and place long gone that we will not see again (a pre-war Philippines, restless under the cloak of an American attempt at colonialism, in uneasy collision between its past and its present). The plots are clever, rarely strain credulity, and satisfy in their conclusions. Unlike some pulp material, the character of Jo Gar is no cardboard figure...he seems real, with a past and a present, like someone you might want to know. Indeed, as reader I felt that I came to know him, and after the last story, I felt a sadness that I now knew all I would know about him.However, like the Sherlock Holmes stories, I will certainly read these again. These are up there with the best in class.

Raoul Whitfield was a prolific writer for the pulps, who contributed nearly ninety stories to Black Mask from 1926 to 1934. His most famous character was Jo Gar, the Asian Island detective,(the Philippine Islands, that is). Gar worked out of a small office in Manila, " a young man, but he looked rather old. His hair was gray; medium in size, but because of the loose way he carried himself he appeared rather small. His face was brown,very brown. ...His eyes were slightly almond shaped and they were seldom normally opened. They held a peculiar squint." So he is described.All twenty four Mask stories are included in this collection along with a final two from Cosmopolitan magazine (before it became feminized.) They are a combination of hard boiled and deductive sleuthing, sort of a cross between Mike Hammer and Sherlock Holmes.While the book credits Whitfield, he actually wrote the stories under the name Ramon Decolta. No matter which name he used this is crime writing at it`s best.

Un détective exotique et diffèrent de ses collègues dans une contrée et une époque disparue mais très intéressant a lire