The Shadow

• 1. Introduction

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  The Shadow is a fictional crime fighter whose catchphrase has outlived most of the stories told about him. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" Those words opened the radio adaptation and earned a lasting place in the American idiom.

  Yet the character began as nothing more than a voice. Street & Smith, an American magazine publisher, created him. Writer Walter B. Gibson later shaped him into a distinct literary hero with a body, a past and a purpose. From there he moved into comic books, newspaper strips, movie serials, games and at least five feature films.

  Three questions run through his history. How does a voice with no face become a hero that audiences ask for by name? Why did the radio hero turn invisible while the print hero wore a cloak and carried pistols? And which later heroes owe him a debt?

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• 2. A Voice Without a Story

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  On the 31st of July 1930, a mysterious narrator went on the air over CBS to introduce the Detective Story Hour. Sales of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine were declining. To adapt the magazine's tales for the air, the company brought in writer-director William Sweets and David Chrisman of the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency.

  Chrisman and Sweets decided that a sinister storyteller should introduce each tale. Scriptwriter Harry Charlot floated options such as The Inspector and The Sleuth. Then he proposed The Shadow, and the name stuck. Sidney Slon wrote most of the show.

  James LaCurto first gave the narrator his voice. After four months, the busy character actor Frank Readick Jr. took over. Readick brought a hauntingly sibilant quality to the role and turned the narrator into a national sensation.

  Detective Story Magazine got a different kind of attention than its publisher expected. Listeners were far likelier to remember the announcer than the tales he introduced. Soon they were asking newsdealers for "that Shadow detective magazine". No such magazine existed.

  Sunday evenings at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time soon belonged to the character, who hosted segments of The Blue Coal Radio Revue. That began a long partnership with the sponsor Blue Coal. In October 1931 Street & Smith reused him for a new Love Story Hour. Reference books, and even Gibson himself, say he narrated it. He did not. His only role was in promotions for his magazine, delivered at the close of each episode.

  In October 1932 the persona moved to NBC for a time, airing Mondays and Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m. Readick played the host, and LaCurto took occasional turns. Readick later returned for a final CBS mystery anthology. The series disappeared from CBS on the 27th of March 1935. Street & Smith had insisted that the storyteller give way entirely to the master crime fighter of Gibson's pulp stories.

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• 3. Maxwell Grant

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  Henry William Ralston, circulation manager at Street & Smith, saw the newsstand demand and moved quickly. He commissioned Walter B. Gibson to write stories about The Shadow. Gibson used the pen name Maxwell Grant and claimed the tales came "from The Shadow's private annals", told to him. Over the next 20 years he wrote 282 of the 325 stories. Each was novel-length, and a new one appeared on the 1st and 15th of the month. The first, The Living Shadow, went on sale on the 1st of April 1931.

  Gibson's hero dressed in black, worked mostly after dark and terrified criminals into making mistakes. His creation also laid the groundwork for the superhero archetype. It combined a stylized look and name, assistants, arch-enemies and a hidden identity. Gibson named two literary sources himself: Bram Stoker's Dracula and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The House and the Brain".

  Film serials may have played a part. The first episode of the French serial Judex reached American audiences as The Mysterious Shadow, and the costume of Judex resembles the Shadow's. French comics historian Xavier Fournier also points to The Shielding Shadow, a silent serial whose hero could turn invisible. He sees the Shadow as a blend of the two. French readers in the 1940s even saw some Shadow strips relabeled as Judex adventures.

  Two full-length novels every month was a punishing pace, so guest writers shared the load. Lester Dent, the author behind Doc Savage, contributed, as did Theodore Tinsley. In the late 1940s the mystery novelist and magician Bruce Elliott temporarily became the main author and wrote numbers 306 through 320. Street & Smith manuscript reader Richard Wormser contributed two.

  After the Summer 1949 issue, The Shadow Magazine stopped appearing. Gibson nevertheless wrote three more official stories between 1963 and 1980. The first opened a run of nine mass market paperbacks from Belmont Books. In them the hero gained psychic gifts, among them the mind-clouding trick known from radio, which made him effectively invisible. Return of The Shadow carried Gibson's own name. Dennis Lynds wrote the other eight, from The Shadow Strikes to The Shadow, Destination: Moon, under the Maxwell Grant pseudonym. Gibson's last two works were novelettes: "The Riddle of the Rangoon Ruby" in 1979 and "Blackmail Bay" in 1980.

  In 2015 the novel The Sinister Shadow arrived from Altus Press. Will Murray wrote it from unpublished material that Lester Dent produced in 1932 under the pen name Kenneth Robeson. Set in 1933, it pits the Shadow against Doc Savage amid a crime wave driven by a kidnapping-extortion ring. The mysterious Funeral Director leads that ring. A 2016 sequel, Empire of Doom, is set in 1940. There Shiwan Khan strikes at his old enemy, and Doc Savage joins the Shadow to defeat him.

  In 2020, James Patterson Entertainment and Condé Nast Entertainment announced a series by Patterson and Brian Sitts. The first novel, The Shadow, appeared in 2021. In it, Lamont Cranston jumps from 1937 to 2087 and faces Shiwan Khan in a futuristic New York. The second, Circle of Death, followed in 2023. The arrangement also covers potential screen adaptations.

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• 4. Faces of the Hero

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  The August 1937 issue, The Shadow Unmasks, finally gave the hero a real name: Kent Allard. Until then his past was deliberately murky. In The Living Shadow, a thug who claims to have seen his face remembers "a piece of white that looked like a bandage". In The Black Master and The Shadow's Shadow, villains glimpse his true face. They decide he has no face of his own beneath many borrowed ones.

  According to the early stories, Allard was a celebrated pilot who flew for France in World War I. In The Shadow's Shadow, from 1933, one character knows him as the "Black Eagle". Later stories, beginning with The Shadow Unmasks, changed the alias to the "Dark Eagle". After the war, Allard looked for a new challenge and found it in fighting criminals. He faked his death by crash-landing his plane in Guatemala. There the Xinca tribe took him for a supernatural being and gave him two loyal aides. He then settled in New York City, adopted many identities to gather information and recruited agents. Only a few of them knew about his other identities.

  A wide-brimmed black hat and a crimson-lined black cloak with an upturned collar completed the pulp Shadow's look, worn over an ordinary black business suit. He carried M1911 pistols. He also used stage-magic tricks to persuade his quarry that he was supernatural. One trick, "The Devil's Whisper", relied on a chemical compound on his thumb and forefinger. Snapping his fingers produced a flash of flame and a sharp explosion.

  His hand bore a girasol ring set with a purple stone, sometimes painted red on covers. The Czar of Russia gave it to Allard during World War I, in The Romanoff Jewels, published in 1932. The Shadow Unmasks later described it as one of two rings made from stones removed from the eyes of an idol the Xinca built.

  Lamont Cranston, a wealthy young man-about-town, became the Shadow's best-known alter ego. In the pulps he is a separate person. This rich playboy tours the globe while the Shadow lives in his place in New York, as in The Shadow Laughs from 1931. A close resemblance makes the swap convincing, as Dictator of Crime explains in 1941. When they first meet, the Shadow threatens to take over Cranston's life entirely unless the playboy lets him use his name whenever he is abroad. Arrangements were already under way, including switched signatures on various documents. Alarmed, Cranston agrees, judging that sharing his identity beats losing everything. In Crime over Miami, from 1940, the two sometimes meet to impersonate each other.

  As Cranston, the Shadow often visits the Cobalt Club, an upscale lounge and restaurant for the wealthy. There he spends time with New York City Police Commissioner Ralph Weston.

  Henry Arnaud, a businessman first seen in The Black Master on the 1st of March 1932, is another real person whose identity Allard borrows. Isaac Twambley, an elderly man, debuts in No Time for Murder in December 1944. Fritz is an old, seemingly slow-witted janitor at police headquarters who listens to conversations and examines recovered evidence. He first appears in The Living Shadow, in April 1931. Chinatown knows him as Ying Ko, a name that first appears in Teeth of the Dragon and returns in The Golden Pagoda. In those stories he often battles the criminal Tong.

  Even in 2015, Will Murray's The Sinister Shadow found a new face for him. In that novel he poses as George Clarendon, a celebrated criminologist from Chicago. Clarendon once belonged to the Cobalt Club and is a longtime friend of Commissioner Weston.

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• 5. Clouding Men's Minds

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  The 26th of September 1937 brought a new kind of Shadow to the Mutual Broadcasting System, with the episode "The Death House Rescue". Street & Smith had signed a fresh agreement with Blue Coal that year, and Gibson and scriptwriter Edward Hale Bierstadt developed the series together. Orson Welles, then 22, starred as Lamont Cranston, a "wealthy young man about town". The Sunday evening series stayed on Mutual until the 26th of December 1954.

  Kent Allard never made it to the microphone. For simplicity, the radio Shadow is only and always Lamont Cranston, with no regular cover identities, though he sometimes takes short-term disguises or aliases.

  Radio time in the 1930s was too tight to explain where the Shadow was hiding until he struck. Invisibility solved the problem. Criminals, like the audience, knew him only by a haunting voice. Cranston's voice was natural, and added effects marked the switch to the Shadow, whose voice turned sinister and seemingly everywhere at once. The radio explanation was that he had "the mysterious power to cloud men's minds, so they could not see him". In the magazine stories, he never became literally invisible.

  The signature line did not belong to Welles. Frank Readick spoke it, holding a water glass beside his mouth to create the echo. Behind it played an excerpt from Opus 31 by Camille Saint-Saëns, Le Rouet d'Omphale.

  In "The Death House Rescue", Cranston lists London, Paris, Vienna, Egypt, China and India as the places where he studied. He learned fields of science and "the old mysteries that modern science has not yet rediscovered". He says his apparent mind reading and hypnosis are not magic but forgotten scientific secrets. In "The Temple Bells of Neban", also from 1937, he credits a Yogi priest in Delhi with teaching him to cloud minds. The priest is "Keeper of the Temple of Cobras". The power has a weakness. He wears no mask or disguise while invisible. An enemy able to disrupt his hypnosis could expose his face and make him an instant target. That is why he proceeds cautiously in that episode.

  In the debut episode, Cranston says he always meant to use his knowledge to fight evil forces that slipped past conventional authorities. When Margo Lane suggests working openly with the police, he implies that the public would reject his unusual methods. Working outside the law, he concludes, is the only way he is effective.

  Next to his pulp counterpart, the radio Shadow of 1937 was gentler. He preferred capturing his foes to shooting them. He sometimes showed compassion for them, and at times he blamed society for conditions that strip people of hope and push them toward crime.

  Welles departed in 1938, and Bill Johnstone replaced him for five seasons. After Johnstone came Bret Morrison, John Archer and Steven Courtleigh, though the actors were rarely credited. Morrison served longest, 10 years across two separate runs.

  The Whistler, another radio hit with a similarly mysterious narrator, grew out of the Shadow's success. An Australian version starring Lloyd Lamble was produced in 1946. That same year, the cartoon "The Talking Magpies", the debut of the precursors of Heckle and Jeckle, referenced the radio program in one scene.

  In 1968 the Metro Record label "Leo the Lion" released an LP titled The Official Adventures of The Shadow. It held two new 15-minute productions by John Fleming, "The Computer Calculates, but The Shadow Knows" and "Air Freight Fracas". Bret Morrison, Grace Matthews and Santos Ortega returned as Cranston, Margo Lane and Commissioner Weston, with Ken Roberts as announcer. Dozens of LPs of original broadcasts followed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and compact discs brought more of the old shows to market.

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• 6. Allies and Enemies

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  Harry Vincent opens the Shadow's roster in the first Shadow story, where he attempts suicide and the Shadow stops him. Recruited on the spot, Vincent becomes a regular and ranks among his most dependable aides.

  Rutledge Mann, a stockbroker, followed a similar path. His business had collapsed and his debts were piling up. He was on the verge of suicide when the Shadow, who knew his situation, recruited him. Mann first appears in Double Z on the 1st of June 1932. He collects information, taking over from Claude Fellows, the only agent ever shown dying, in Gangdom's Doom from 1931.

  Moses Shrevnitz, known as Shrevvy, drives a cab and doubles as chauffeur. Clyde Burke is a newspaper reporter, initially paid to collect clippings. Burbank is the radio operator who keeps the Shadow in contact with his agents. Dr. Rupert Sayre is the personal physician, Miles Crofton sometimes pilots the autogyro and Jericho Druke is immensely strong. Slade Farrow helps the Shadow reform criminals. Hawkeye, once an underworld informer, now tails gangsters. In Chinatown, Dr. Roy Tam is the contact man, and Myra Reldon works under the alias Ming Dwan.

  Clifford Marsland debuts in the ninth novel, Mobsmen on the Spot. He served years in Sing Sing for a crime he never committed. The underworld wrongly believes he killed at least one person. He uses that crooked reputation to infiltrate gangs. Commentators often compare his method to that of the Green Hornet.

  Police wanted the Shadow at first, yet he also cultivates them. Cranston's conversations with Commissioner Ralph Weston, and afterward Commissioner Wainwright Barth, his uncle, pass along information. Weston thinks Cranston is a wealthy playboy playing at detective work for fun. Detective, later Inspector, Joseph Cardona is another police contact and a key character in many novels.

  The radio drama pared the cast of major characters down to three: the Shadow, Commissioner Weston and Margo Lane. It was believed that making Harry Vincent a regular would create too many male characters. With criminals usually male as well, listeners might struggle to tell the voices apart. The script for "The Death House Rescue", reprinted in The Shadow Scrapbook, includes Vincent, but he never made the broadcast. Clyde Burke appeared occasionally, though not as an agent. Shrevvy was a dim-witted friend who occasionally drove Cranston and Lane, unaware that Cranston was the Shadow.

  Agnes Moorehead was among the actresses who played Margo Lane, the only person who knows Cranston's secret. In the first episode she admits she loves him. She hopes he will stop hiding behind the Shadow if the police truly need him. Early scripts spelled her name "Margot", after Margot Stevenson, a Broadway ingenue later chosen to voice Lane opposite Welles in the summer 1938 Goodrich season. Four years after radio introduced her, Margo entered the pulps as an agent. Readers resented her abrupt, unexplained arrival, and the magazine's letters page printed a flurry of angry mail.

  Shiwan Khan, a would-be conqueror, is the final living descendant of Genghis Khan. He returns in The Golden Master, Shiwan Khan Returns, The Invincible Shiwan Khan and Masters of Death. Dr. Rodil Moquino, a self-proclaimed Voodoo Master, bends people to his will with hypnosis in The Voodoo Master, The City of Doom and Voodoo Trail. Basil Gannaford, called the Wasp, has an oversized head atop a tall, fragile frame, an electric sting in his grasp and a buzzing voice. Benedict Stark, who calls himself the Prince of Evil, appears in four stories. Theodore Tinsley wrote all of them.

  The only recurring criminal organization was the Hand. It appears in The Hand, Murder for Sale, Chicago Crime, Crime Rides the Sea and Realm of Doom. In each book the Shadow defeats one Finger of the group. In Wizard of Crime, King Kauger works unseen as the mastermind behind the events of Intimidation, Inc. The Silent Seven are referenced in the earlier title The Death Tower.

  Five-Face, Judge Lawless, The Silver Skull, Kwa the Living Joss and The Green Terror were among the many one-shot villains. One-shot criminal collectives included The Hydra, The Green Hoods, The White Skulls, The Five Chameleons and The Salamanders. Diamond Bert Farwell and four other villains from the first two pulps came back at least once.

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• 7. Pages and Panels

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  On the 17th of June 1940, the Ledger Syndicate offered newspapers a daily Shadow comic strip. Gibson wrote the continuity, adapting plots from the pulps, and Vernon Greene drew it. The strip ran until the 20th of June 1942 and told 14 stories. It opened with "Mystery of the Sealed Box". Its last story, "The Cliff Castle Mystery", was left unfinished when the strip was canceled.

  Decades later, collectors could find it again. Malibu Graphics collected the strip through its Eternity Comics imprint, starting with Crime Classics dated July 1988. Thirteen black-and-white issues appeared, ending in November 1989. Avalon Communications reprinted it again in 1999 in Pulp Action, but that run ended with its eighth issue, in the middle of a story.

  Street & Smith launched Shadow Comics in March 1940, partly to cross-promote its pulps and attract younger readers. The title ran 101 issues through September 1949. A Shadow story led each issue, followed by strips starring other heroes from Street & Smith's pulps.

  In Mad #4, dated April-May 1953, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder spoofed the hero as "The Shadow'", short for "Lamont Shadowskeedeeboomboom". The character returned in Mad #14 in August 1954, guest-starring in a spoof of Mandrake the Magician.

  Archie Comics published an eight-issue Shadow series from August 1964 to September 1965, amid the 1960s superhero boom. The first issue loosely followed the radio hero, though blond. By issue #2, writer Robert Bernstein and artist John Rosenberger had turned him into a campy, heavily muscled hero in a green-and-blue outfit. Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel wrote later issues. American Comic Book Chronicles called the result "Totally at odds with everything that personified the classic Shadow". It added that it is "still regarded in many quarters as one of the greatest comic book misfires of the 1960s."

  Starting in November 1973, DC Comics ran a 12-issue series. Dennis O'Neil wrote it, and Michael Kaluta drew issues 1-4 and 6. It tried to honor both the pulp and radio versions. The Avenger, another pulp hero, made a guest appearance in issue #11.

  In 1986 DC tried a different approach. Howard Chaykin's four-issue miniseries The Shadow: Blood and Judgment moved the hero to modern-day New York. It sold well at first, but some traditional fans disliked its two Uzi submachine guns, black comedy and extreme violence. A monthly series by writer Andy Helfer followed in 1987, drawn mainly by Bill Sienkiewicz and Kyle Baker. In 1988 O'Neil and Kaluta returned with the Marvel Comics graphic novel The Shadow: Hitler's Astrologer, which unfolds during World War II.

  Between 1989 and 1992, DC ran The Shadow Strikes!, with Gerard Jones writing and Eduardo Barreto drawing. Set in the 1930s, it brought the hero back to his pulp roots. He teamed up with Doc Savage for the first time in a four-issue story. He also met celebrities of the era, including Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, John L. Lewis, Frank Nitti and Jake Guzik. In issue #7 he meets radio announcer Grover Mills, a character modeled on the young Orson Welles. The name comes from Grover's Mill, New Jersey, the small town where the Martians land in Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. When Condé Nast raised its licensing fee, DC ended the run at 31 issues plus an annual. It was still the longest-running Shadow comic since Street & Smith's 1940s series.

  Dark Horse Comics took over the rights from Condé Nast in the early-to-mid-1990s. Its miniseries included The Shadow: In the Coils of Leviathan in 1993 and The Shadow: Hell's Heat Wave in 1995. A two-issue comic adaptation of the 1994 film followed as merchandising.

  In August 2011, Dynamite Entertainment licensed the character from Condé Nast. Its first ongoing series, with Garth Ennis writing and Aaron Campbell illustrating, debuted on the 19th of April 2012 and ran for 26 issues. The eight-issue miniseries Masks teamed the 1930s Shadow with the Spider, the Green Hornet and Kato, and a 1930s Zorro. In August 2015, Dynamite launched a second volume, with Cullen Bunn writing and Giovanni Timpano drawing.

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• 8. Screens and Successors

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  Six short films appeared in 1931 and 1932, made by Bryan Foy Productions and distributed by Universal Pictures. They drew on the Detective Story Hour, and Frank Readick Jr. supplied the narrating voice of the Shadow. The first, A Burglar to the Rescue, was copyrighted in July 1931, and the last, The Circus Show-Up, in January 1932.

  Rod La Rocque starred in The Shadow Strikes in 1937. The film spells the hero's name Lamont Granston. Its 1938 sequel, International Crime, made him a reporter and amateur criminologist who trades on the Shadow name as a radio stunt. Both came from Grand National Pictures.

  In 1940, Columbia Pictures released a 15-chapter serial starring Victor Jory. In it, the Shadow pursues a mastermind called the Black Tiger, whose sabotage hits railroads and factories across the United States. In 1946, the low-budget studio Monogram Pictures made three B-movies with Kane Richmond: The Shadow Returns, Behind the Mask and The Missing Lady. Richmond wore a full face-mask in place of the cape and red scarf.

  Television tried twice. Tom Helmore played Lamont Cranston in a 1954 series. In 1958, a pilot with Richard Derr as the Shadow never aired. Its two episodes were compiled into the film Invisible Avenger, which returned to theaters in 1962 as Bourbon Street Shadows. James Wong Howe directed one of the two episodes.

  The 1994 film starred Alec Baldwin as Lamont Cranston. It opens in early 1930s Tibet, where Cranston is Yin-Ko, a ruthless warlord who smuggles opium. The holy man Tulku has him kidnapped and teaches him to read thoughts and cloud minds. Cranston returns to New York as the Shadow, in payment for his past misdeeds. Penelope Ann Miller plays Margo Lane, who is born telepathic and can resist his mind-clouding. John Lone plays Shiwan Khan, who also studies under the Tulku but never reforms. Khan plans to destroy New York with a new atomic bomb. The Shadow defeats him in a psychic duel by hurling a shard of mirror into his forehead. Khan wakes in an asylum, where surgery has removed his telepathic powers.

  Baldwin wore a black cloak, a long red scarf over his mouth and chin, a double-breasted trench coat and a black slouch hat. His pistols were modified M1911 .45-caliber pistols with nickel plating and ivory grips. The prop guns were actually modified LAR Grizzly Win Mags, nicknamed "Silver Heat". The film also let Cranston project the illusion of a different face, which echoed the pulp portrayal. Peter Boyle played Shrevvy, Andre Gregory played Burbank and Jonathan Winters played Commissioner Barth. It flopped with both the box office and critics.

  Ocean Software finished a video game tied to the film for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. After the film's poor showing, the game was never released. A ROM later leaked online. Bally released a Shadow pinball machine in 1994, designed by Brian Eddy. It remains popular, thanks to its Phurba diverters and its unique upper playfield.

  On the 11th of December 2006, the website SuperHero Hype reported a new Shadow film for Columbia Pictures. Director Sam Raimi and Michael Uslan would co-produce it. On the 16th of October 2007, Raimi said, "I love the character very much". In 2012, at San Diego Comic-Con, he said the team had not developed a good script, so the film would not go ahead.

  Bob Kane and Bill Finger patterned Batman on mystery men from the pulps, the Shadow among them. Finger built Batman's debut story, "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate", on "Partners of Peril", a Shadow pulp by Theodore Tinsley. He later said, "my first Batman script was a takeoff on a Shadow story". The early Batman also showed little remorse about killing or maiming criminals and used firearms. Decades later, Dennis O'Neil brought the two together in Batman #253 in November 1973. There Batman called the Shadow his "biggest inspiration". In Batman #259, in 1974, the Shadow revealed that he knew Bruce Wayne's identity, and promised to keep it safe.

  Alan Moore credited the Shadow as a key influence on V, the title character of V for Vendetta. That miniseries became a Warner Bros. film in 2006. The Shadow also inspired Disney's cartoon Darkwing Duck, which ran in 1991-1992. A quest series in the 2015 game Fallout 4 follows the Silver Shroud, a crime-fighting detective from radio shows of the old world. Even the cover story left a mark, since a band borrowed the playboy alias for its name, The Lamont Cranston Band.

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