Rodney William Whitaker (June 12, 1931 – December 14, 2005) was an American film scholar and writer who wrote several novels under the pen name Trevanian. Whitaker wrote in a wide variety of genres, achieved bestseller status, and published under several other names, as well, including Nicholas Seare, Beñat Le Cagot, and Edoard Moran. He published the nonfiction book 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." Whitaker adamantly avoided publicity for most of his life, his real name a closely held secret for many years. The 1980 reference book Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers listed his real name in its Trevanian entry.
Life
Born in Granville, New York, Whitaker became enthralled with stories as a boy. His family struggled with poverty. He lived for several years in Albany, New York, as a youth (a time portrayed in his last published work).
Whitaker earned bachelor's and master's degrees in drama at the University of Washington. While there, he wrote and directed his three-act play Eve of the Bursting, which was his master's thesis production in the UW Playhouse. The company manager and assistant director of the production was Jerry Pournelle. Whitaker went on to earn a doctorate in communications and film at Northwestern University.
He taught at Dana College in Blair, Nebraska, where he was chairman of the communications division. He served in the US Navy during the Korean War. Later, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for study in England.
When Whitaker wrote his first two novels, he was chairman of the Department of Radio, TV, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin, where he continued to teach for many years.
Whitaker married the former Diane Brandon, and they had four children: sons Lance and Christian, and daughters Alexandra and Tomasin. They lived for years in the Basque countryside of France.
Whitaker died December 14, 2005, in Somerset, England. He was survived by his wife and grown children.
Literary works
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 40 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 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, 50-ish 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 Nicholas 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 retelling 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 11 Editors' Choice books by the Historical Novel Society.
Street of the Four Winds, Trevanian's tale of Parisian artists caught in the 1848 revolution, based on his research of the era, remains unpublished. An excerpt is posted on Trevanian's web site.