Today's review's going to be a quickie.
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| The Shadow KNOWS....the schedule of the E Train... |
In 1930, on a show called
Detective Story Hour, a new pop culture phenomenon was created with a character called The Shadow. But the Shadow wasn't any ordinary gumshoe. He kept his face hidden. He could disappear in plain sight. He could cloud the mind's of men. He had a secret identity. (He had Orson Welles' voice for a while...). The Shadow was one of the original superheroes who made his way from the radio into movies, books, comics, and on into Pop Culture Valhalla.
I first became aware of The Shadow in comics, just about the time that the run-of-the-mill guys in spandex just weren't cutting it for my young teen brain. Digging through some dusty boxes of comics I came across the above image by the great Mike Kaluta: The big fedora, the red scarf, the dual automatics. It was something from the past that had come to invade my future. But like many of my pulp favorites, The Shadow was in some ways of too bygone an era in style to become a true obsession, but like many of my pulp favorites, sometimes I can't resist the allure of his siren call...guess he's clouding my mind.
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| The Shadow KNOWS...the danger of Radon... |
So I picked up this Bantam paperback of
The Death Tower I found hidden away on a bottom shelf of a used bookshop. I'd been looking for this edition if only for the fantastic cover by Sandy Kossin. It's a reprint of a Shadow story from 1932 in which the Shadow does battle with Albert Palermo, a well-respected doctor who also happens to be...dun-dun-DUNNNN...a criminal mastermind. Palermo has been staging disappearances and deaths for his ill-gotten gains, and when the Shadow crosses his path, he thinks himself more than a match for the vigilante and his network of part-time helpers.
There's always a fun pulpy charm to the old Shadow stories that I've read. They move at a breakneck pace. There's always at least a small handful of narrative inconsistencies and a few strange plot contrivances. In some ways, it's what makes them quaint and enjoyable. In others, it's what keeps them from being truly memorable. Maxwell Grant, alias for author and magician Walter B. Gibson, cranked out nearly 300 of these Shadow novellas over 20 years, supposedly writing 10,000 words a day to keep apace of demand. It's a wonder they make any sense at all.
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| Walter Gibson...His fingers were each an inch long when he retired from writing The Shadow |
And so, like many of my other pulp recommendations, I'd say you could do a lot worse for thrills and a few chills than delving into the annals of this icon of yesteryear (who still shoots his way through the pages of comics) than by picking up one of his old adventures....however, unlike Conan or Matt Helm, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with some of The Shadow's backstory and aliases and support staff, because at the pace these books go, they're not likely to help you out before their simply over.
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| The Shadow KNOWS...clean energy policy... |
