THE READING RHEUM: THE LIVING SHADOW (1931)

 

The opening scene of THE LIVING SHADOW--in which the mysterious crusader confronts would-be suicide Harry Vincent and convinces him to devote his life to crimefighting-- is one of the best pieces of writing in the pulps, outclassing even some early stories of Ray Bradbury. I wish that the rest of the book was as mythic as this. But since I'd read it before, I knew that after a few blood-and-thunder moments, the novel would settle down into a fairly routine crime thriller with some unremarkable villains and a forgettable crime. I will give Walter Gibson credit for writing a valid mystery, though, as I've also read a few SPIDER stories where Norvell Page shows that this was not his strong point.

Since the magazine was a response to further monetize an ongoing radio show with a radio-host named "The Shadow," it was no surprise that a few chapters suggest that the heroic Shadow actually relays information to his aides through an ongoing radio program. I have the impression that this device soon falls by the wayside.

It's astounding as to how much of the Shadow's mythology appears in the first book, indicating that Gibson devised the base concept more thoroughly than most pulp-heroes were conceived. The Shadow has his girasol ring here, though he doesn't use it to hypnotize anyone, and in lieu of the reader "hearing" the Shadow's thoughts, the solitary hero expresses his thoughts by writing out casefiles to himself. The laugh of course is there, but there's less of the illusionism and more of the disguise-mastery. 

As this novel commences, the public (and police official Joe Cardona) don't know of the Shadow's existence, but the underworld has a hazy idea of his menace to their projects. In fact, one chapter discloses much more of the Shadow's potential backstory than I would have expected this early in the game. A thug testifies:

This time I looked for his face. I saw nothing but a piece of white that looked like a bandage. Maybe The Shadow ain't got no face to speak of... There was a young guy once who the crooks was afraid of-- he was a famous spy in the War, and they say he was wounded over in France-- wounded in the face, I think. I think The Shadow is this guy come back--

I don't know how much Gibson did with these nuggets, though Robert Sampson says the author called the gimmick "the horror face." Apparently Michael Uslan remembered the device, since he and ER Cruz re-used it in THE SHADOW #11 (DC, 1975):