Authors and Books
for Children

Phyllis A. Whitney: Queen of Romantic Suspense

You know her name, of course, if you've been anywhere near a library or bookstore in the last sixty years. From The Red Carnelian to Amethyst Dreams, she's delivered the best in romantic suspense, year after year. But you may not know that Phyllis A. Whitney's remarkable literary legacy includes books specifically for young readers, too.

Born of American parents in Yokohama, Japan, on September 9, 1903, Phyllis Ayame Whitney spent her early years in Japan, China, and the Philippines. Though she wrote stories even as a teenager, her ambition was to be a dancer. After her father's death when she was fifteen, she came to the United States for the first time, with her mother, living in Berkeley, California, and then San Antonio, Texas.


When her mother died two years later in San Antonio, Whitney moved to Chicago to live with an aunt and graduated from McKinley High School in Chicago in 1924; a year later, she married George A. Garner, and they had a daughter in 1934. (She and Garner divorced in 1945.)

Though she had worked as a dance instructor in San Antonio, Whitney turned her efforts to writing, eventually selling a short story to the Chicago Daily News. While continuing to write, with minimal financial success, she worked in the Chicago Public Library and various bookstores.

In 1941, she published her first book, a young adult novel entitled A Place for Ann, quickly followed by three other books for young people and her first foray into the mystery genre for adults, 1943's Red Is for Murder, later retitled The Red Carnelian. During the 1940s she worked as children's book editor at the Chicago Sun and later at the Philadelphia Inquirer; she also taught writing at Northwestern University.

Her 1947 young adult novel Willow Hill dealt honestly with racial issues. The story of what happens when black families move into a new housing project in a previously all-white town focuses on the adjustments, misunderstandings, and conflicts among high school students struggling to find their common humanity. Though today's books for young people routinely tackle controversial issues, Willow Hill was quite unusual for its time; in fact, Whitney's editor didn't want it and she had to find another publisher. The book won the "Youth Today" contest and received Book World's Spring Book Festival Award.

After Willow Hill, Whitney turned increasingly to juvenile mysteries, beginning with Mystery of the Gulls in 1949. In 1961, she received the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award for best juvenile mystery for Mystery of the Haunted Pool; she received another Edgar in 1964 for Mystery of the Hidden Hand. Secret of the Tiger's Eye (1961), Secret of the Missing Footprint (1970), and Mystery of the Scowling Boy (1973) also received Edgar nominations. The heroines of Whitney's stories are usually young teenagers with realistic lives and everyday growing pains, though the highly detailed settings are often exotic: for example, Tiger's Eye is set in Africa, Hidden Hand in Greece, The Secret of the Samurai Sword (1958) in Japan, Mystery of the Golden Horn (1962) in Turkey, Secret of the Spotted Shell (1967) in the Virgin Islands.

In 1955, Whitney began a remarkable string of romantic suspense novels, publishing thirty-eight books over the next forty-two years, most of them best-sellers. Like her young adult mysteries, these stories frequently have unusual backdrops, from a Hudson River mansion (Thunder Heights, 1960) to a mist-shrouded island off the Georgia coast (Lost Island, 1970), to a Hawaiian estate (Silversword, 1987). Some of the settings of the young adult mysteries recur in the romantic suspense books; Blue Fire (1961) takes place in Africa, Seven Tears for Apollo (1963) in Greece, Moonflower (1958) in Japan, Black Amber (1964) in Turkey, Columbella (1966) in the Virgin Islands. Whatever the setting, it is always meticulously researched; Whitney has said that her only hobby is researching and visiting new locales as backgrounds for her books.

The heroines of these stories, which are usually told in the first person, are often young women in search of their past, returning to their childhood homes after a long absence to unlock a repressed memory, or to unravel the truth of what happened to a deceased family member, or to confront some fear or nemesis. Though some of the earlier books are historical, most are set firmly in the present; the situations they deal with include everything from spousal abuse to child custody battles to psychic phenomena to incest, though never in a sensational way. They offer courageous, determined, realistically flawed heroines who persevere in their pursuit of truth--and generally find true love as well. Discussing the romantic suspense, or gothic, genre, Whitney said:

The heroine usually starts out in a moment of crisis in her life, facing serious trouble and with a big problem to be solved ... She is often arriving in a new place with which she is unfamiliar--a place that is clearly to decide her future destiny ... Our heroine is courageous, struggling valiantly against great odds ... Though happy endings are in order, since this is intentional escape fiction, your heroine must deserve her reward at the end of the story, whatever it is. And she had better have her own goals and solve her own problems, even if the hero comes along at the climax to rescue her physically. ("What Do You Mean, 'Gothic'?," in Mystery Writer's Handbook, 1976)