The Shadow - Greatest Pulp Magazine Crime-Fighting Hero

In an era before Superman, when heroes gained super powers, The Shadow was a mysterious figure who was able "to cloud the minds of men" with a somewhat plausible skill that fell far short of the unearthly abilities of the later costumed superheroes. The Shadow could essentially hypnotize people through use of a psychic talent so that they did not see him.

Walter Gibson

The Shadow was the creation of Walter Gibson who would turn out novel-length stories in pulp magazine format using the pen name of Maxwell Grant. He was a prolific and accomplished journalist, lecturer, and puzzle maker, with a taste for magic. Throughout his life, in fact, Gibson wrote books with and about magicians, performed magic himself, and assisted some of the best-known like Houdini, Blackstone, and Thurston. His pen name of Maxwell Grant combined the names of two magic dealers Gibson knew.

The Shadow Appears

One day Gibson went to a pulp publisher with a concept for a character who was a crime fighter, combining stage magic techniques including the escape skills of Houdini, and a hypnotic skill learned in Tibet that made him invisible.

At that time, it happened, there was a radio character the pulp owner wanted to develop who, although unidentified, became known to fans as The Shadow. Introduced in 1931, he was a character with a sinister laugh merely used to introduce Detectuive Story Hour which the publisher, Street and Smith, sponsored. In fact, by the time of Gibson's arrival, the mystery series had folded and The Shadow was being retained to introduce, of all things, a love story series while editors tried desperately to figure out what to do to capitalize on his popularity.

People were actually showing up at newsstands asking if there were any magazines featuring that character. Not the mystery series or the love stories, but that bookend character, The Shadow.

Gibson and the editor shook hands. The deal was done. Gibson started turning out four book-length mysteries featuring The Shadow for a planned quarterly and submitted them. However, the response was so tremendous when The Shadow hit the stands, Gibson was asked to step up production to provide a monthly Shadow novel then, some months later, two a month.

Gibson in Overdrive

Gibson always kept his typewriter busy. Many years later, in his post Shadow days, he actually had in his house a writer's dream....several small libraries, each with its own typewriter and specialty -- true crime, magic, psychic phenomena, astrology, and gambling. His main library had three typewriters.

His typewriters churned out more than a million words a year during The Shadow years. Gibson was to work at his writing so much that his fingers would bleed. From a practical point of view, Gibson would later note that throughout the Depression, he was able to keep a job, turning out two novels a month like clockwork. He did it for a decade.

Gibson worked to keep the character fresh with new crimes and settings, eventually bringing in super villains to test his crime-fighting hero. In 1937, reputedly the greatest of his super villains was unleashed against The Shadow, Shiwan Khan, who would be the villain used in the Alec Baldwin movie decades later.

Trained in Asia in the strange skill that was the trademark of The Shadow, Lamont Cranston fought crime once he'd returned to his homeland. Although the identity of Cranston as The Shadow was retained in radio, readers of the magazine learned that the crime fighter actually assumed Cranston's identity when a cooperative Cranston wasn't present. The Shadow was in reality Kent Allard, an aviator presumed lost on a South American expedition.

The Shadow had a number of imitators who also utilized nearly superhuman talents, to follow in his footsteps, including one who became an icon in his own right, Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze.

End of the Gibson Era

Gibson finally stepped away in the early 1940's having written an amazing 282 of the 352 Shadow novels, representing 17 million words of copy. Theodore Tinsley and Bruce Elliot would in their turn assume the identity of Maxwell Grant until the magazine folded in 1949. Even Doc Savage creator Lester Dent co-wrote one novel.

Gibson certainly did not abandon writing. He wrote books on magic, psychic phenomena, and other topics right up to his death at age of 88.

On Radio

Spawned by a radio character, it was inevitable The Shadow would return to the airwaves a few years after the magazine debuted a radio show that ran from 1937 to 1954. For the first year, then-popular radio actor Orson Welles was The Shadow, often speeding from another radio job by taxi to the studio where he read his part cold from his script. Agnes Moorhead played Margo Lane. Other actors followed: William Johnstone, John Archer, Steve Courtleigh, and Bret Morrison.

In Movies

Among the movies based on the character are, most notably, several B-movies in which The Shadow is little more than a standard investigator, a not uncommon treatment in adaptations of colorful pulp and comic heroes. Victory Jory played the somewhat more familiar caped Shadow in a 1940 serial in which he battled the Black Tiger who was in possession of a death ray.

The Shadow (1994), starring Alec Baldwin as Lamont Cranston, Penelope Ann Miller as Margo Lane, and superb film villain John Lone as Shiwan Khan, tried to resurrect the franchise with a 1930's New York setting and plot elements adapted from Gibson's work. It was a valiant effort which foscused on the mystery and uniqueness of the character while battling the last descendant of Genghis Khan, but failed to catch fire at the box office, as they say.

The Shadow...Returns?

In his heyday, The Shadow was marketed through comic books, a newspaper comic strip, games, costumes, and more.

Another Hollywood attempt is reportedly under consideration. Certainly the darkness of the concept which made Batman a modern hit should help The Shadow's appeal to modern audiences. Perhaps once again The Shadow will return to battle wrong-doers with a pair of pistols and an ability to cloud men's minds.