"A form emerged from a side window. But it was invisible in the darkness. The man below did not see it, although his eyes were glued to the spot. Like a shadow, the form moved slowly upward toward the roof. It was part of the blackness. No human eye could detect it. The gangster who was watching saw it only when it arrived at the top of the building, above the third floor. The figure emerged from the darkness with surprising suddenness. It appeared as a batlike shape, an ominous black silhouette against the sky."
-- From The Shadow Laughs! by Maxwell Grant
(Walter B. Gibson), originally published
October, 1931, in The Shadow Magazine.
Long before the "Dark Knight" there was the "Knight of Darkness," as the Shadow was often called in his pulp and radio salad days. The origins of the entire "superhero" genre can be traced back to the Shadow. In fact, it would be hard to overestimate the impact of this character upon American popular culture.
In the early days of the Great Depression there was an explosion of "pulp" magazines -- book-thick collections of punchy tales printed on ultra-cheap (pulp) paper and selling for all of ten cents a copy. The pulps harked back to the dime novel exploits of Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell (and lesser stalwarts like Fred Fearnot) in the 19th century.
Hard-boiled mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler started in the pulps, and virtually the entire science fiction genre was created in those quick-to-yellow pages. There were hundreds of titles in a wide array of genres, from war to horror, Western to romance, crime to sports. Competition was ferocious.
Market-leading publishers Street & Smith launched an innovative promotional effort on Thursday, July 31, 1930, sponsoring a weekly series of radio dramas, Detective Story Hour, adapted from tales in the firm's flagship magazine Detective Stories. The show was a great success, but not quite in the fashion the company intended.
What really captured the public's imagination was the ominous deep voice of the show's anonymous novelty host, a mysterious personage that was nameless at first, until writer Harry Engman Charlot dubbed him "The Shadow." Listeners began asking news dealers not for the well-established Detective Stories itself, but for "the magazine that told about the Shadow" -- that is, for a magazine that did not yet exist, about a "character" that was nothing more than a name and a scary voice.
But for Street & Smith general manager Henry Ralston, the mere non-existence of a magazine or a character was a minor detail. The Golden Age of Pulp was above all an age of instant fiction, and to fill the Shadow gap Ralston called upon a fast and reliable fictioneer who happened to stop by his office one day.
Walter B. Gibson was one of pulp's most prolific wordsmiths. He was a free lance writer who had ghost-written how-to books for superstar magicians Houdini and Blackwell. In fact, Gibson combined the names of two dealers of magician's supplies, Maxwell Holden and U.F. Grant, to produce a suitable "house name" for the author of The Shadow: Maxwell Grant.
As Grant, Gibson turned out the first four Shadow novels in as many months. The debut installment, The Living Shadow, hit newsstands in March, 1931, and this "weird creature of the night" was an instant smash. In every important respect, Gibson/Grant originated the Shadow -- an inspired creation that struck a nerve in the grim 1930s.
Where previous American heroes had been rock-jawed paragons, "The Shadow was an Old Testament avenger," according to pop culture critic Chris Steinbrunner. He was "a ruthless slayer of the wicked, very befitting the Depression." He was, in the words of a later radio script, "as haunting to superstitious minds as a ghost; as inevitable as a guilty conscience."
"But now they saw a tall, black clad figure at the other side of the room. The sable form stood motionless. It looked like a specter from the world beyond. It had come like a messenger of vengeance."
-- From The Shadow Laughs! by Maxwell Grant
(Walter B. Gibson), originally published
October, 1931, in The Shadow Magazine.
To conjure this grimly heroic figure, Gibson inverted the black-and-white oppositions of classic melodrama. "Menacing figures dressed in black had long been popular characters in mystery stories, films and plays," writes Steinbrunner, "reaching out of the darkness to confront the forces of good."
An immediate inspiration was the French arch-fiend Fantomas, introduced in 1911 in a series of novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, and featured in surrealistic silent serials directed by Louis Feuillade. Fantomas was, like the Shadow, an ever-elusive, almost-shape-shifting figure; in fact, he never appeared in the stories undisguised, as himself. According to Steinbrunner, "(Walter) Gibson took this terrible, dread shape and made it the hero."
Despite his spooky demeanor, the Shadow was also an up-to-date scientific crime fighter, wafting about in private planes and employing short wave radio as a staple tool. Such crafty gimmicks as explosive dust that could be blasted into a thug's face with a snap of the fingers, or suction cup glove and boots for climbing walls, were extrapolated from actual military and intelligence devices uncovered by Gibson during his research.
Stealing a trick from the Scarlet Pimpernel, Gibson created the first authenticated superhero secret identity for the Shadow in the person of millionaire playboy Lamont Cranston. This substitute persona was later downgraded to one of many false identities the Shadow could assume as required.
The demand for new Shadow stories was such that Gibson's original contract for four novels a year was renegotiated twice, as the magazine went first monthly and then, incredibly, bi-weekly. Gibson was called upon to produce twenty-four 60,000 word novels -- over a million words of new Shadow material a year!
It wasn't long before Grant/Gibson had the work of cranking out Shadow stories down to a science. "I was turning out first drafts at a rate of four pages an hour," Gibson wrote in 1979, in The Shadow Scrapbook, "each page running over 250 words. That meant a little over thirty pages, or better than 8,000 words, in an eight-hour day. At that rate, I could finish a 60,000 word story in less than eight days."
Gibson's pace actually increased as he settled into the job. His personal best was the production of two novels, The Death Giver and The Shadow's Justice, 120,000 words in all, in a single week.
It wasn't until, August, 1937, in a novel entitled The Shadow Unmasks, that the really-real, honest to God, ultimate secret identity of the character was revealed. He was a daredevil aviator named Kent Allard who crash landed and supposedly perished in the jungles of the Yucatan. He had picked some top secret "magical" abilities from the local natives and assumed the Lamont Cranston fortune and persona as a convenient base of operations. (The real Lamont Cranston was a separate character in the stories who knowingly lent his identity to the Shadow.)
The Shadow's most formidable adversary, Shiwan Khan, a descendent of the great Genghis, was introduced in the magazine in September, 1939, in the novel The Golden Master. Khan was the first bad guy in the canon to share many of the Shadow's own extraordinary mental abilities. Like Sherlock Holmes and his near-equal Professor Moriarity, the Shadow and Khan were on a collision course. After four titanic encounters their final showdown occurred in Masters of Death in May, 1940.
In the 1940s there was a Shadow comic book, written by Gibson, and a daily comic strip drawn by Vernon Green that did well until a World War II paper shortage lead to the demise of many strips.
"There are those, of course, who claimed that they had heard his voice coming through the spaceless ether over the radio. But at the broadcasting studio, The Shadow's identity had been carefully guarded. He was said to have been allotted a special room, hung with curtains of heavy black velvet, along a twisting corridor. There he faced the unseeing microphone, masked and robed. The underworld has gone so far as to make determined efforts to unravel The Shadow's identity -- if it were truly The Shadow whose sinister voice the radio public knew. For there were doubters who maintained the voice was but that of an actor..."
-- From The Living Shadow! by Maxwell Grant
(Walter B. Gibson), originally published
April, 1931, in The Shadow Magazine.
As Walter Gibson set about fleshing out the character in his first few pulp stories, Street & Smith sponsored a promotional contest: "To the radio audience," they announced, "The Shadow has been a voice -- and eerie, sinister, creepy voice. But what does The Shadow look like? What kind of man is he? ... The Shadow will give hints over the radio as to his appearance and habits. If you are alert, these hints will enable you to form a good idea of the Shadow."
The man who first gave voice to The Shadow was identified as Frank Readick, Jr., but the actor was never actually unmasked. Like Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger, Readick was never depicted without his hat and cape and a mask to conceal his face. From the beginning, the Shadow's radio presence was incorporated into the magazine stories; by listening for emphasized words in a special closing segment, radio fans could "decode" secret messages, "as the agents of The Shadow do when on the trail of crime."
The Shadow was transplanted to a different series, "Blue Coal Radio Revue," in 1931; even when the show was re-titled "The Shadow," he still functioned as host and narrator only, in a crime anthology format. The character also introduced a series of adaptations from Love Story Magazine before he found his niche.
On September 26, 1937, after a two-year hiatus, Blue Coal began sponsoring a "real" Shadow program, dramatizations of the crimefighter's own adventures, adapted from Gibson's novels. The new actor hired to give voice to the Shadow was the twenty-two year old "boy wonder" Orson Welles, whose Mercury Theater Company was the toast of Broadway.
The radio series departed in several respects from Gibson's formula. Very few of the Shadow's secret agents made the transition to the airwaves, and socialite Margo Lane (played by Welles' stage associate Agnes Morehead) was added as a romantic foil for Lamont Cranston.
Because the character's background was simplified as well (Kent Allard was jettisoned), a new explanation of The Shadow's paranormal powers was required. As Welles told Morehead in the episode "Temple Bells of Nebon" (October 24, 1937), "Years ago in India, a yogi priest, keeper of the Temple of the Cobras as Delhi, taught me the ancient mysteries. He taught me the mesmeric trick that the underworld calls invisibility." Cranston also acquired a "secret based on the phenomenon of telepathy."
SHADOW: I don't want you to tell me anything. I'm going to think with your brain.
GORDON: I don't understand.
SHADOW: Don't try. Concentrate, Gordon. Think -- about everything that happened. Relive the entire incident. Make pictures in your mind. Pictures -- do you know what I mean?
GORDON: Like -- like television?
SHADOW: Yes -- or mental telepathy, or mind reading, or hypnotism -- I don't care what you call it. Stop talking -- think.!
-- From "The Death House Rescue" by Edward Hale Bierstadt, originally broadcast September 26, 1937 on The Shadow program.
The radio show was a crucial stepping stone for Welles. He performed in 39 Shadow dramas, then left to parlay his new popularity into his own anthology series, the legendary Mercury Theater of the Air. Of the actors who succeeded him in the role, Bret Morrison was the most durable, playing the part for a decade, throughout the 1940s. Most of the Mercury players joined Welles when he launched his film career with the even more legendary Citizen Kane in 1941. Agnes Morehead continued to portray Margo Lane until her untimely death in 1944.
Orson Welles wasn't the only distinguished artist whose career owed something to the Shadow. Victor Jory played the character in theatrical serials. The great SF illustrator Ed Cartier contributed 800 illustrations to The Shadow up to 1949, and the ranks of the radio-Shadow's scriptwriters included Alfred Bester, who went on to become a distinguished science fiction writer (The Demolished Man).
"By 1940 the Shadow was more than a household word; it had become a household commodity. People would buy the magazine on a Friday and bring it home to read over the weekend while the kids were going off to the Saturday movies to see Victor Jory in a Shadow serial and other members of the family were listening to the Shadow radio program on Sunday afternoon. . We had already discussed the prospect of a daily comic strip."
-- Walter B. Gibson, in The Shadow Scrapbook, 1979.
The Shadow radio program continued on the air for twenty-five years, until 1954, when radio drama was on its last legs.
The pulp magazines, including The Shadow, were put on a reduced, monthly schedule, in response to a wartime paper shortage in the '40s, and never fully recovered. After the war, a new invention called the paperback book quickly edged the pulps off the newsstands.
Over the years, seventy-five million copies of The Shadow Magazine had been published.