Full Details
Rodney William Whitaker
| Full Name: | Rodney William Whitaker |
| Born: | June 12, 1931 Granville, New York, USA |
| Died: | December 14, 2005 West Country, England |
| Occupation: | Teacher, author, film scholar |
| Nationality: | American |
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Biography
Rodney William Whitaker also writes under the pen name of Nicholas Seare
Rodney William Whitaker was an American film scholar and writer who wrote several successful novels under the pen name Trevanian. Whitaker wrote in a wide variety of genres, achieved best-seller status, and published under several other names as well, including Nicholas Seare, Beñat Le Cagot and Edoard Moran. He published the non-fiction The Language of Film under his own name.
Between 1972 and 1983, five of his novels sold more than a million copies each. He was described as "the only writer of airport paperbacks to be compared to Zola, Ian Fleming, Poe and Chaucer." He revealed his real name in an interview with the New York Times in 1979.
Whitaker said his wife chose the pen name Trevanian based on her appreciation of English historian G.M. Trevelyan. Trevanian wrote many bestselling novels in different genres, which received highly favorable critical reviews.
His first novel, published at the age of forty when he was teaching at the University of Texas, was The Eiger Sanction, a thriller that became a worldwide best seller. In 1975 it was adapted as a movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Trevanian described the movie as "vapid" in a footnote in his later novel Shibumi. He requested (and received) a screenwriting credit as Rod Whitaker. The balance of the script was written by Warren Murphy, the mystery writer perhaps best known for co-writing the Destroyer series of men's action novels.
Saddened that some critics did not recognize the story as a spoof, Trevanian followed it with a more intense spoof, The Loo Sanction (1973), which depicted an ingenious art theft. Then came The Main (1976), a detective novel set in a poor neighborhood of Montreal, featuring widowed, fiftyish police lieutenant Claude LaPointe. Trevanian originally intended to publish The Main under the pen name Jean-Paul Morin.
Next came Shibumi in 1979, a meta-spy novel, which received the most critical acclaim. In 1983 he published The Summer of Katya, a psychological horror novel. The wide diversity of genres led to a popular theory that "Trevanian" was a collective pen name for a group of writers working together. Under the name Nicolas Seare, Trevanian also published 1339...or So: Being an Apology for a Pedlar (1975), a witty medieval tale of love and courage; and Rude Tales and Glorious (1983), a bawdy re-telling of Arthurian tales.
After a 15-year hiatus, Trevanian returned with a Western novel called Incident at Twenty-Mile (1998), and then a collection of short stories, Hot Night in the City (2000). His last published novel, written while he was in declining health, was The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (2005), an autobiographical coming-of-age story of a boy surviving with his mother and sister in the slums of Albany, New York in the years preceding and during World War II. In November 2005 it was selected as one of eleven Editors' Choice books by the Historical Novel Society.
