RodneyWhitaker was an author who wrote in his own name. He also wrote under several pseudonyms, a connection which he managed to keep unknown or at least obscure until his death. Since his psuedonyms wrote often in the spy / mystery genre, speculation about his identity and the reality or not of his pen-names was quite a cottage industry. Although his arguably most famous pseudonym Trevanian never made a promotional appearance a backstory and mythos grew up around even the false identity. It was said that Trevanian lived in the Basque mountains, for example.
RodneyWhitaker taught communications at the University of Texas. He wrote under at least these names:
Under his own name RodneyWhitaker wrote:
Most of Whitaker's works are dry send-ups of their genre, simultaneously dead-on and knowingly off the conventions of the type. The unlikely hero is just a little too unlikely. The villian's fatal flaw is just a little too bizarre, or obscure, or fatal. Most of his work was with spy or mystery fiction with a bit of a taste for the macabre. Reading him feels a bit like reading Saki?, if Saki wrote in more forms than the short story (and he did, but not often.) From his writings, I suspect that Whitaker enjoyed the pseudonyms and created persona for their own sake as well as for the privacy they afforded. -- JimBullock
See also: Trevanian, NicholasSeare
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