In the case of authors, it is always interesting to speculate how spending part of one’s life in Dorchester may have influenced their published works.
Paul Whelton was born in Dorchester in 1895. His family lived on Holiday Street and later Westville Street. Paul lived with his family into the 1920s. His father, John, was a driver of horse-drawn cars for the Boston Police Department. Paul indicated on his draft registration card for World War I that he was working as a newspaper reporter for the Boston Journal. He served in the war and came back a disabled veteran, although the disability was never specified.
By the time he died in 1953, he had worked for the Boston American, Boston Traveler, New York Daily News and Daily Mirror and the Los Angeles Examiner. His brother, Alfred, who was two years younger, became political editor of the Boston American.
In the 1940s, when Paul was living in East Braintree, he began to write crime novels with a main character who was a newspaper reporter named Garry Dean. The books were published as part of the Lippincott Main Line Mysteries. The first in the Garry Dean series was titled Death and the Devil and was also published later under the title Flash-hold for Murder. The book was called a hair-curling thriller about wise-cracking newspaper Garry Dean, who walked out of his job into a stew—ingredients a millionaire, a dead gangster and a dancer of parts, named Renee.