from Gale’s Contemporary Authors:
AUTHOR NAME: WHITAKER, Rod(ney).
BIRTH YEAR: 1925
VARIANT NAME(S): Benat le Cagat, J. L. Moran, Nicholas Seare, Trevanian
CAREER: Writer. Former teacher of film and drama at the University of Texas at Austin.
WRITINGS:
The Language of Film, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1970.
(Under pseudonym Nicholas Seare) 1339… Or So: Being an Apology for a Pedlar, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1975.
(Under pseudonym Nicholas Seare) Rude Tales and Glorious: Being the Only True Account of Diverse Feats of Brawn and Bawd Performed by King Arthur and His Knights of the Table Round, Crown (New York City), 1983.
NOVELS; UNDER PSEUDONYM TREVANIAN
The Eiger Sanction, Crown, 1972.
The Loo Sanction, Crown, 1973.
The Main, Harcourt, 1976.
Shibumi, Crown, 1979.
The Summer of Katya, Crown, 1983. Round
SIDELIGHTS: Although Rod Whitaker has written many successful thriller novels under the pseudonym Trevanian, it is difficult to determine how many works he has published with other names. In a brief interview with Carol Lawson of New York Times Book Review, he said he writes under five different names on various subjects, including theology, law, aesthetics, and film, and plans in the future to write “erudite little novels for special audiences.”
Whitaker’s first thriller, The Eiger Sanction, is the story of Jonathan Hemlock, an art historian who occasionally works as an assassin for an American intelligence agency. Hemlock is assigned to murder an enemy agent during a mountain-climbing expedition on the Eiger in Switzerland. Anatole Broyard of the New York Times wrote: “Though The Eiger Sanction is superior suspense on almost every page, the mountain- climbing sequence at the end is by far the best part, for here the details are most authentic… There are moments … when one forgets that this is not a `serious’ novel.” And Newgate Callendar, in the New York Times Book Review, praised the “quality of intelligence that makes The Eiger Sanction a little more than another post- Fleming exercise in mayhem.” The sequel, The Loo Sanction, was less well-received, with Callendar dismissing it as “tired and derivative.”
Whitaker’s next novel, more ambitious than and quite different in tone from his others, was ten years in the writing. A murder mystery in form, The Main was described by Donald Newlove in the New York Times Book Review as “a philosophical novel, no melodrama.” The hero, Claude LaPointe, is an aging police detective with a terminal heart condition who is seeking a murderer among the residents of a Montreal slum called the Main. Whitaker places less emphasis on the mechanics of police work, however, than on the emotional lives of the characters, including LaPointe, the young prostitute who moves in with him, and the rookie policeman who assists his investigation. Evan Connell, in Harper’s, praised the book’s "wit and perception, " noting that Whitaker’s “narrative style is warm, his raffish characters sketched with considerable insight, … he has a feeling for the moments, the hours, and the seasons of human life.”
In Shibumi, Whitaker again makes use of an antihero who is a professional assassin. Nicholai Hel is as skilled in languages, sexual technique, and the Japanese game of Go as he is in methods of killing; he seeks the obscure Japanese aesthetic ideal of shibumi, an active spiritual tranquility. Hel inadvertently incurs the enmity of the Mother Company, an international consortium of oil companies, thwarting its attempt to protect a gang of Palestinian terrorists and then surviving the Mother Company’s attempt on his life. Shibumi contains a strong parody element in its treatment of the conventions of sex and violence in the thriller as well as in the eccentric characterization of its antihero. Christopher Dickey, in the Washington Post Book World, remarked: “Though Hel is the central figure in a book marred by a cast of caricatures and obvious plotting, he is one of the most interesting fantasy figures to appear in recent thriller fiction. To the considerable extent that Shibumi is a character study of Hel, it is one hell of a pleasure to read.” John Leonard of the New York Times observed: “Much … of Shibumi is quite silly. It just happens to be the most agreeable nonsense in commercial fiction this spring… Although Shibumi can’t stand synopsizing, it demands to be read.”
BIOGRAPHICAL/CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Contemporary Literary Criticism, entry listed under Trevanian, Volume 29, Gale, 1984.
Films on the Campus, A. S. Barnes (San Diego, CA), 1970.
PERIODICALS
Cavalier, April, 1968.
Harper’s, November, 1976.
New Yorker, August 13, 1979.
New York Times, October 5, 1972; November 5, 1973; June 1, 1979.
New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1972; November 7, 1976; June 10, 1979.
Saturday Review, October 16, 1976.
Spectator, July 14, 1973.
Washington Post Book World, June 3, 1979.