Jo Gar
Created by Ramon Decolta (Raoul Whitfield)

Diminutive, with short arms, narrow shoulders, stubby fingers and greying hair that make him appear older than he is, polite and soft-spoken, Spanish-Filipino JO GAR is not your typical Black Mask detective. Add to that the fact that the mean streets that he stalks are in Manila in the Phillipines, and you've got one of the more original eyes to appear in the pulps. And one of the very best of them. His cases took him throughout the Phillipines, and, in one case, as far as San francisco. The more than two dozen short stories "the Island detective" appeared in, almost all in Black Mask, are all worth searching for. They occasionally show up in anthologies, and they're all recommended.

Ramon Decolta was the pen name of Raoul Whitfield, who was also responsible for several other eyes in the pulps, most notably Ben Jardinn and Donald Free.

SHORT STORIES

• "West of Guam" (February 1930, Black Mask)
• "Death in the Pasig" (March 1930, Black Mask)
• "Red Hemp" (April 1930, Black Mask)
• "Signals of Storm" (June 1930, Black Mask)
• "Enough Rope" (July 1930, Black Mask)
• "Nagasaki Bound" (September 1930, Black Mask)
• "Nagasaki Knives" (October 1930, Black Mask)
• "The Caleso Murders" (December 1930, Black Mask)
• "Silence House" (January 1931, Black Mask)
• "Diamonds of Dread" (February 1931, Black Mask)
• "The Man in White" (March 1931, Black Mask)
• "The Blind Chinese" (April 1931, Black Mask)
• "Red Dawn" (May 1931, Black Mask)
• "Blue Glass" (July 1931, Black Mask)
• "Diamonds of Death" (August 1931, Black Mask)
• "Shooting Gallery" (October 1931, Black Mask)
• "The Javanese Mask" (December 1931, Black Mask)
• "The Black Sampan" (January 1932, Black Mask)
• "China Man" (March 1932, Black Mask; 1965, The Hardboiled Dicks)
• "The Siamese Cat" (April 1932, Black Mask)
• "Climbing Death" (July 1932, Black Mask)
• "The Magician Murders" (November 1932, Black Mask)
• "The Man From Shanghai" (May 1933, Black Mask)
• "The Amber Fan" (July 1933, Black Mask)
• "The Great Black" (August 1937, Cosmopolitan)

COLLECTIONS

• Jo Gar's Casebook (2002) . Buy this book

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.