INTRODUCTION TO THE 1ST CRIME CLUB EDITION

by Walter B. Gibson

It was early in 1931 when I became acquainted with The Shadow and adopted the pen-name of Maxwell Grant in order to write four novel-length stories recounting his adventures. These were to appear in a quarterly periodical titled The Shadow - A Detective Magazine. When the first two issues sold out, the publishers, Street & Smith, decided to make it a monthly magazine, so instead of an intermittent year's work, I found myself embarked on a steady project. Acting as The Shadow's raconteur proved so much to my liking that I moved steadily ahead of schedule, and it was good that I did, for sales increased so rapidly that by the end of a year, I was offered an unprecedented contract to deliver twenty-four 60,000-word stories in the next twelve months, to put the magazine on a twice-a-inonth schedule.

I met my quota within ten months, putting the magazine so far ahead that there was never any question about keeping up the new pace. By then, I had developed The Shadow from a somewhat nebulous figure into a substantial character with a crew of competent agents, who helped him solve and strike down crime, but he still remained much of a mystery to friend as well as foe. During his early exploits, he appeared in various guises and disguises, depending on the particular quests in which be was engaged. Mostly, he doubled for a much traveled millionaire named Lamont Cranston, using that identity while the real Cranston was away in some distant region.

In action, The Shadow loomed as a cloaked figure, materializing from out of the night, rescuing helpless victims and striking terror into the hearts of evildoers. However, he reserved such theatrics for occasions when they formed a logical climax to a well-developed sequence of events. Between times, The Shadow proved himself a master of deduction as well as disguise. While his major missions were to stamp out mobs or smash spy rings, he often tabled such routines in order to find a missing heir, uncover buried treasure, banish a ghost from a haunted house or oust a dictator from a mythical republic.

There was no limitation to the story themes as long as they came within the standards of credibility--which proved easy, since The Shadow was such an incredible character in his own right that almost anything he encountered was accepted by his ardent followers.

Although the success of The Shadow caused a flood of new "character" magazines to appear on the newsstands, ranging from outright imitations to new departures, with forays into fields of adventure and science fiction as well as crime, the only such magazine to go twice-a-month and maintain that schedule was The Shadow. Many modern students of the "thriller" era have totally overlooked that fact; and now that the question has been raised, they may be quite surprised to learn that the answer was known before The Shadow Magazine embarked on its stepped-up schedule.

Widespread surveys taken while the magazine was appearing monthly showed that a large majority of newsstands sold nearly all their copies within the first two weeks of issue. While other character magazines might show an early flurry, their sales were either spread evenly over the entire period or gained their impetus about the middle of the mouth and sometimes not until the third or even the fourth week.

From the writing standpoint, this made it advisable to adhere more closely to the Cranston guise and to emphasize the parts played by The Shadow's well-established agents, since regular readers evidently liked them. Also, it meant "keeping ahead" of those regulars, with new surprises, double twists in "whodunit" plots, and most exacting of all a succession of villains who necessarily grew mightier and more monstrons as The Shadow disposed of their predecessors.

Some stories themselves were titled after such formidable antagonists as The Black Master, Gray Fist, The Cobra, The Condor, The Python, The Crime Master, and The Mask. Some became so formidable that they were allowed to escape The Shadow's vengeance long enough to return in a future story in order to meet their deserved doom. These included The Voodoo Master, The Hand, The Wasp, and The Golden Master, who figured in four novels with suspenseful intervals between each reappearance.

This continued happily until April 1943, which marked the magazines twelfth anniversary. Then, with the curtailment of paper during wartime, it went back to a monthly schedule. Some four years later, it went bimonthly, then quarterly and finally was suspended with the Summer 1949 issue, titled "The Whispering Eyes."

With its demise, The Shadow Magazine was consigned to an undeserved limbo. A history of Street & Smith, written in 1965, stated that 178 book-length novels were written by Maxwell Grant. That figure has been cited in articles ever since, as though it was something phenomenal. What is really phenomenal is that I actually wrote 282 Shadow novels during the life of the magazine, a mere 104 more than the total given. Whoever checked the bound files must have noted that it went monthly during the first few volumes and was still going monthly during the last few volumes, so there was no need to check dozens of volumes in between.

The first radio program featuring Lamont Cranston as The Shadow went on the air late in 1936, and was adapted from my novels, of which more than 100 had already appeared in print. Other characters from the magazine were also used, and Lamont Cranston acquired a girl friend named Margo Lane, whom I included in The Shadow Comics, which began in 1940 with continuities that I based on The Shadow novels. When The Shadow Magazine went monthly, Margo appeared quite often in the novels, including the two that have been chosen for this volume.

By then, the period of the super-villains was past, dwarfed by the holocaust of World War II. In Murder by Magic and The Mask of Mephisto, you will find The Shadow matching wits with crafty murderers who have done their utmost to lead you - and The Shadow!- along false trails.

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THANKS TO MIKE INGALLIS FOR SUPPLYING THIS.