Some people avoid publicity, but Trevanian took it to an extreme. Trevanian was a best selling writer — at least five of his books sold over a million copies — and he also published as Nicholas Seare, Beñat Le Cagot, and Edoard Moran. He even published one nonfiction book, The Language of Film, under the name Rodney William Whitaker. Whitaker was his real name, but that wasn’t connected to his pen names until the reference book Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers solved the mystery in 1980.
By the time his identity was revealed, Whitaker was 49. He was born June 12, 1931 in Granville, New York state in the US. He was born into a very poor family, but was a good student and attended the University of Washington. He earned both a BA and MA in drama. He went on to earn a PhD in communications and film, and became chairman of the communications department at Dana College in Nebraska. When the Korean War arrived in 1950, Whitaker served in the US Navy. After the war he received a Fulbright scholarship in order to continue his studies in England.
His next institution was the University of Texas, where he was chairman of the department of Radio, TV, and Film, and it was there that he wrote his first two novels. He didn’t begin writing novels until he was 40, but he had a successful start — his first book was The Eiger Sanction, which became an international best seller. It was also adapted into a movie, where he received a screenwriting credit as Rod Whitaker. Nobody at the time connected the mysterious author of the book, Trevanian, with the screen writer.
Whitaker evidently didn’t like the movie version of The Eiger Sanction; in a footnote in a later novel he called it “vapid.” He was also displeased at the reception the novel itself received. Whitaker had written it as a spoof of international spy novels, but only a minority of readers seemed to get the joke. So he wrote The Loo Sanction, a crime story about an art theft, which was more obviously a spoof.
By about 1980, Whitaker had published in several genres: spy thrillers, crime novels, psychological horror stories, and something he called a “meta-spy novel.” These all appeared under the name Trevanian, and a theory arose that the pen name was actually used by a whole collective of different writers. Another rumor guessed that the writer was Robert Ludlum, another best-selling author at the time. Whitaker protested that he’d never even heard of Ludlum, and read hardly any books published in the 20th century.
He finally broke his cover, and his silence, in 1979 when he gave an interview to the New York Times. He said “Trevanian is going out of business. Now he can talk.” After retiring from the University of Texas, Whitaker left the US and lived in France and England for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2005 at 74, but you can still visit his website, which is now run by his daughter Alexandra.
