The Shadow

This article is about the pulp fiction/comic book/radio/film hero. For other meanings, see shadow (disambiguation).
"Who knows what evil lurks?"---The Shadow, as seen on the cover of the July 15, 1939 issue of The Shadow Magazine. The story noted on the cover, "Death From Nowhere," was one of the magazine stories adapted for the legendary radio drama.
"Who knows what evil lurks?"---The Shadow, as seen on the cover of the July 15, 1939 issue of The Shadow Magazine. The story noted on the cover, "Death From Nowhere," was one of the magazine stories adapted for the legendary radio drama.

The Shadow is a pulp hero crime fighter created by Walter Gibson, who became even more famous on radio. Featured also in comic books, television, and at least seven motion pictures — including the most recent, starring Alec Baldwin in the title role — The Shadow is best regarded for its radio years, in which pulp crime fiction received perhaps its most compelling broadcast interpretation and sent both parts of its unmistakeable (and never varied) introduction (Who knows...what evil...lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows...) into America's permanent lexicon.

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An accident of birth

The Shadow's birth as the furtive, bump-in-the-night crime solver was practically an accident: the character's name first belonged to the announcer (James LaCurto and, later, Frank Readick) of Detective Stories, a show whose plots were drawn from the pulp magazine of the same name. The magazine was published by Street and Smith, now more familiar for long-running sports annuals, and the company aimed the radio program at boosting the magazine's circulation. The problem was that listeners found the announcer far more compelling than the stories — and began asking newsstands for copies of The Shadow Magazine . . . which didn't exist.

Recognising the demand and responding promptly (and smartly), Street and Smith commissioned Walter B. Gibson to begin writing stories of The Shadow. Using the pen name Maxwell Grant, Gibson wrote a reported 282 out of 325 Shadow stories over twenty years: a novel-length story a month. He fashioned the character at first as a man of villainous elements who used them to battle crime, clad in black and working predominantly after dark, burglarising in the name of justice, and terrifying criminals into vulnerability before he or someone gunned them down. Possibly before the genre had a name, The Shadow was a noirish antihero story in every sense.

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An evolutionary Shadow

The character evolved over his lengthy fiction life. In print, he slouched elusively beneath hat, cape, and often black mask, anticipating another popular radio anti-hero, The Green Hornet. He also skulked in the shadows by his skill at concealing himself — at first. In due course, and in his most famous incarnation, the Shadow became an invisible man who supposedly learned "while traveling in the Orient . . . the mysterious power to cloud men's minds, so they could not see him."

In part, that new incarnation was born of necessity; radio's time constraint made it difficult to describe the Shadow hiding and nearly invisible. Some believe the Shadow a hypnotist, as was explicitly mentioned in at least a few radio episodes; others contend that the Shadow could manipulate Qi. But considering radio wasn't a visual medium in the first place, the Shadow's invisibility was easy enough to accept.

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Who Knew What Evil . . .

In print, the Shadow was born Kent Allard, a famed aviator who crashed in the South American tropical jungles and, after making a fortune in that region, returned to the United States, arriving in New York City and adopting numerous identities to cloak his return. One of them was Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town. Those whose relationship with The Shadow came through radio alone had to wait until the August 1937 publication of The Shadow Unmasks to learn the truth; in this novel, Cranston revealed his true identity as Kent Allard.

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The Shadow of the air

The Shadow was long believed to have debuted on radio as a program in its own right 26 September 1937, on the Mutual Broadcasting System. But the furtive detective actually premiered in September 1931, on CBS, as part of the hour-long The Blue Coal Radio Revue (named for the show's sponsor), featuring Frank Readick — the "Shadow" announcer of Detective Stories — as the Shadow, and playing Sundays at 5:30 p.m. Eastern standard time. The stories also appeared on Thursday nights for a month, when Love Story Drama (another Street and Smith creation) took the Thursday night slot — but also featured occasional portrayals of the Shadow.

Blue Coal took up a long relationship with the Shadow, moving the radio series to NBC in October 1932 with Readick playing the character on Wednesday nights now. Two years later, NBC ran the stories on Mondays and Wednesdays, both at 6:30 p.m., with LaCurto taking occasional turns as the title character. Three years later came the beginning of the half-hour drama radio buffs have remembered so well, with the then-unknown Orson Welles as the Shadow, the show moving to Mutual, and the famous catch phrase now in full play.

Welles didn't speak that signature line — Readick did, using a water glass next to his mouth for the echo effect — but he did make a credible Shadow, two years before his notoriety as the mastermind of Mercury Theatre on the Air's production of War of the Worlds, before he was succeeded by such actors as Bill Johnstone, Bret Morrison (the longest tenure, with ten years in two separate runs), John Archer, and Steve Courtleigh as Lamont Cranston/The Shadow. The radio show also introduced female characters into the Shadow's realm, most notably Margot Lane (played by Agnes Moorehead among others) as Cranston's love interest and crime-solving partner, who eventually wound up in Gibson's pulp novels. In the 1994 movie, Margot's name was spelled "Margo." However, early scripts of the radio show clearly show that the character's name was spelled "Margot" at the time.

Once it joined Mutual as a half-hour series, The Shadow didn't leave Sunday radio until December 26, 1954. It outlasted the magazine that gave birth to it: The Shadow Magazine ended with the summer 1949 issue, although Gibson wrote three new "official" stories between 1963 and 1980.

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Influence

Some believe The Shadow birthed much of the concept we have come to know as the modern superhero; such characters as Batman and The Green Hornet reference Lamont Cranston's alter ego. Both characters operated mostly by night, and the Green Hornet in particular operated outside the law, insinuating himself into criminal plots in order to put an end to the activities of master criminals. But whereas the Shadow carried a real gun, the Green Hornet carried only a lightweight pistol that fired non-lethal gas and, later (on a short-lived television version) a retractable electronic laser "sting" used mostly to cut through thick barriers. While Batman briefly carried a pistol in his first few years, he quickly abndoned the use of weapons altogether; his creators are said to have feared that giving the character a sidearm would make him resemble the Shadow too greatly.

The Shadow was also the likely inspiration for a later radio hit, The Whistler, whose protagonist likewise knew "many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak," and whose calling card — a short, almost macabre whistle — was at least as familiar as The Shadow's famous opening line. Ironically, the title role of the show was once played by former Shadow Bill Johnstone.

In 1981, The Shadow became one of the acknowledged influences for V, the title character in V for Vendetta.

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Adaptations

The Shadow has been depicted in comic books several times, beginning with the comics of Vernon Greene in 1938. The most acclaimed depiction was in the 1970s Shadow comic written by Dennis O'Neil and Mike Kaluta published by DC Comics. Other noteworthy Shadow comics from DC were created by Howard Chaykin, Andy Helfer and Kyle Baker, and Gerard Jones and Eduardo Barreto.

The character has been adapted for film numerous times. The movie The Shadow Strikes was released in 1937, starring Rod Larocque in the title role. Larocque returned to the following year in International Crime, although in this version "The Shadow" was merely a radio gimmick. A serial starring Victor Jory and two short subjects starring Kane Richmond were each made in the 1940s. Richmond's Shadow, in fact, wore a black face-mask similar to the type worn by the serial hero The Masked Marvel. Dark Horse Comics published three mini-series based on the movie's version of the character. It also published a two-part team-up between The Shadow and Doc Savage, another well-known pulp hero. The Shadow has also been adapted into the Wold Newton family. And, an analogue of the Shadow, Bret Leather, The Spider, also shows up in Warren Ellis' Planetary series as a member of Doc Brass' (Doc Savage) group of superheroes.

In 1994, the Shadow was recast once again in a big-budget feature film, The Shadow, starring Alec Baldwin as Lamont Cranston/The Shadow and Penelope Ann Miller as Margo (sic) Lane. This time, Cranston was written as a disaffected veteran of World War I who drifted through Asia and ultimately became a brutal warlord and opium smuggler, until he was kidnapped by a Tibetan order of monks and brought to their monastery. A tulku, their leader, recognizing the power of harnessing Cranston's inner darkness, reformed and trained him to use that darkness against evil rather than for it. Cranston then learned how to confuse and control the minds of others, particularly how to become invisible except for his shadow. His nemesis in the film was an evil warlord and fellow telepath named Shiwan Khan, the last descendant of Genghis, played by John Lone. Though the storyline provided a certain logic to the old radio hit's suggestion that Cranston learned his dark art in the Orient, the film was a box office bomb that never came close to launching the new franchise planned for it.

But to most fans of the concept and the character, only one Shadow knows — the one with the telephone-echo-like voice, snickering devilishly at each step of unmasking a criminal's mind and crimes, balancing between true love and duty, and knowing what evil lurked in the hearts of men every Sunday for a quarter of a century on the radio.

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See also

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External links