BACKSTAGE: Phyllis A. Whitney dies at 104

By Mary Alice Blackwell

Published: February 14, 2008

The plan was to clear out some of the books in my library. Four shelves were overloaded and the stacks on the floor were beyond the teetering point. I got a box and set out to cull my collection.

There was a stack by Phyllis A. Whitney.

Did I really need that many-

I opened up “The Singing Stones.” It was a story set in Charlottesville. A child psychologist returns home to counsel her ex-husband’s daughter.

I pushed the still empty box aside. Running my finger across the autograph on the title page, I remembered the first time I met Miss Whitney.

Although twice married, she preferred to keep the courtesy title.

Old fashioned- Not hardly. She also went by her maiden name.

Phyllis Adyame Whitney was the name her parents given her when she was born in Yokohama, Japan, on Sept. 9, 1903. Adyame means “iris” in Japanese. Miss Whitney also insisted that the A. be included on her bookcovers.

When I met Miss Whitney she had just won a lifetime achievement award from Malice Domestic, a national group of women mystery writers. She invited me to her home in Faber.

It was May 1990. I had been writing for the Daily Progress only for a few years when I was sent to Nelson County to interview the author, who had just finished writing her 74th book. As I sat down in her writing room, I wondered who was interviewing whom.

Miss Whitney was a master storyteller. Her keen powers of observation reflected in the details of her plots. But the best-selling author’s quick smile calmed my nerves.

She saw me look at the posters promoting three of her books. “Vermilion,” “Rainsong” and “Emerald” hung on the wall opposite her floor-to-ceiling bookcase that ran the length of her work room.

“My granddaughter got two of them off the subway,” Miss Whitney said. “She climbed up on the seat one night, took them down and gave them to me.”

Her laugh was quick and easy. At 86 years of age, Miss Whitney already had more than 40 million copies of her books in print in the United States and 18 foreign countries.

She pulled out a notebook to show me where she already was working on her next novel. That’s where she penciled in her ideas, her characters and her research before she sat down at the typewriter.

Yes, she preferred working with paper.

“It’s all what you get used to,” she said. “I think in pencil. When I’m editing, I have to have a pencil in my hand.”

Miss Whitney, who grew up in the Philippines and pre-Communist China, credited a teacher for her love of writing.

“I was 12,” she said. “A missionary teacher praised me. It went to my head, and I have been writing ever since.”

Almost.

When her father passed away, 15-year-old Phyllis and her mother moved to California. But her mother died soon after and the teen was sent to live with an aunt in Chicago. After high school, she went straight to work.

“I don’t believe college is the end of everything,” she told me in 1990. “I probably would have had a snooty professor who would have told me that I couldn’t write. Instead, I’ve been educating myself all my life.”

And she did. Married and divorced from George Garner, Miss Whitney surrounded herself with the written word. She worked in libraries. She worked in bookstores. She even became the children’s book editor for the Chicago Sun and Philadelphia Inquirer. She researched new characters as she traveled the world with her second husband, Lovell Jahnke.

The woman who didn’t go to college even began teaching at Northwestern University and New York University.

By that time, she already had made a name for herself in the literary world. She wasn’t an overnight success, she said. Three hundred of her first 500 short stories were rejected. But she still kept putting pencil to paper. She published her first book in 1941, “A Place for Ann.” It was the first of 34 books she wrote for young adults.  That launched a prolific 60-year career that sometimes produced two novels a year.

“With every new book, I do research,” she had said. “And a whole new world opens up and I get excited.”

The Mystery Writers of America gave Miss Whitney its Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1988. That went up alongside her Edgars for “The Mystery of the Haunted Pool” in 1960 and “The Mystery of the Hidden Hand” in 1963.

When she was 84, the widowed Miss Whitney commissioned her grandson-in-law to design her home in Nelson. She left Long Island to be near her daughter, Georgia Pearson. She stayed in Faber the rest of her life.

Miss Whitney died last Friday of pneumonia. She was 104.

She is survived by her daughter, two grandchildren, two great-grand children and a legion of loyal mystery fans.

Her books still proudly rest on my bookshelf.