The creators of early commercial radio were fond of calling it "broadcasting on the airwaves."  It really wasn't.  Most early radio stations had weak signals that might carry hundreds of miles when the stars were right, but that were usually lucky to carry a few dozen.  If those stations wanted anything more than local talent, they relied upon three early networks -- CBS and the two NBC's -- that fed them, not through the airwaves, but through an elaborate series of telephone connections called the Round Robin by many early radio participants.  Far from an "empire of the air," it was a series of landlocked fiefdoms dependent upon the phone company -- a world of communications that was only as modern as the technology of the early 1930's could make it.

The great beneficiaries of the Round Robin were the programming centers that served the bulk of the American people.  Remembering that half the U. S. population then lived in the eastern time zone, and another third in the central, it's little wonder that New York dominated from the start -- a fact confirmed, not created, by the erection of Radio City in Rockefeller Center later in the decade.  Hollywood might have won the race for motion pictures, but long distance rates that added $2500 to the cost of every hour of network programming that originated in Los Angeles assured network radio retained its eastern origins.  New York became the center where radio's creative talents, from actors to advertisers, congregated for a decade or more.

In the process it drew some interesting friends to its world.  One of them was Henry William Ralston.  An editor and entrepreneur, he was then the managing editor of the New York publishing house of Street & Smith.  His firm, at 79 Seventh Avenue, dated back to the Civil War, and enjoyed a reputation for successful popular magazines.  In the late 19th century they had launched some of the most popular dime novels of the era, of which the original Nick Carter stories are the best remembered today.

Then, early in the new century, they sensed the appeal of a new type of publication -- the pulp.  Named for the cheap, acidic paper upon which they were printed, the first modern pulp -- Frank Munsey's Golden Argosy -- appeared from that rival house in 1882.  Descendants of half a century's popular printed entertainments, large in both size and print, bound with a distinctive and colorful cover whose illustration was considered a major selling point, and marketed largely through news stands for five or ten cents a copy, many pulps proved a commercial success.  Street & Smith entered the filed in direct competition with Munsey in 1905 when the first issue of The Popular Magazine appeared.  The rivalry would last for years.

Until 1912 the best way to describe the new pulps was "genteel entertainments."  A variety of formats and authors was the norm in each issue and the emerging middle classes were their primary market.  The values of the middle class -- from propriety to athleticism -- were the pulp's values.  But then in 1912 the unexpected success of a new pulp writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his new fictional hero, Tarzan of the Apes, caused the pulp publishers to wonder if they weren't missing a trick.  Within a short time the pulp market was segmenting to offer distinct genres -- science fiction, fantasy, westerns, romances,  mysteries, adventures -- and the genres in turn were segmenting by topic and sometimes by target audience.  In particular, some of the smaller publishing houses began to experiment with the racier plot lines and simpler language that had earlier endeared many dime novels to working class audiences.

Most of the segmentation and experimentation probably stemmed from an interesting feature of public consumption.  The pulps sold well month after month, good times and bad.  But except for a few of the most established leaders, such as Argosy, the life span of a particular title was seldom more than five years.  Loyal to the pulp format in general, but fickle in their loyalty to any particular title, the public posed a particular marketing challenge.  Editor Ralston knew all this early in 1930 when he made a simple proposal: see if the new advertising potential of network radio could be harnessed to the needs of newsstand marketing.  He chose for his pilot Detective Story Magazine, a private-eye weekly full of pedestrian plots about sinister villains, and offered to sponsor a weekly radio show, Detective Story Hour, where actors would dramatize the current issue.

The idea went nowhere fast until the writing for the show was turned over to Harry Charlot.  Charlot was a mentally unstable hack writer, who was later found poisoned in September, 1935, while living under an assumed name in a Bowery flophouse.  Unlike most pulp plots, the writer’s death remains an unsolved crime.  In this earlier period, Charlot proposed that the show's lead actor, James LaCurto, open each show with a lead-in question about the week's crime, a scarifying laugh, and a sinister answer that "The Shadow knows...."  They first tried it on July 31, 1930.

It worked, after a fashion.  News stand dealers in New York City were soon reporting that customers were asking about the magazine, but that what they said they wanted was "that Shadow magazine."  The word came back to Ralston, who decided to produce a new magazine, to be called The Shadow, that could capitalize upon the unexpected demand.  He turned the project over to the editor responsible for Detective Story Magazine, Frank Blackwell, telling him to develop a suitable format -- and to do it quickly while the public interest was still present.

Blackwell was apparently less enthusiastic about the idea that Ralston -- so much so that he was unwilling to devote the services of one of Street & Smith's own authors.  Like many pulp publishing houses, Street & Smith operated on a thin profit margin, and liked to do as much work in house as possible.  It maintained its own writers and artists, and printed its magazines on basement presses that impressed every visitor to the Seventh Avenue building by vibrating so violently as to threaten to shake the building down.  Yet for this assignment, Blackwell looked to an outsider who later claimed he had merely dropped by to chat about an unrelated story idea on the morning in December, 1930.

The writer's name was Walter Gibson.  He was thirty-three, a free-lance journalist by profession, a lover of language, and one of the developers of the modern newspaper crossword puzzle.  He was also an avid magician, who had performed theatrically during his college days and who associated with most of the professionals of the 1920's -- including Houdini, Thurston, Blackstone, and the astrologer, A. F. Seward.  Gibson was in New York reading galley proof for two books he had recently ghost written -- Magic for Houdini, and Modern Card Tricks for Blackstone.

Most important, Gibson was also an occasional contributor to Street & Smith detective publications, where he wrote stories emphasizing crime as a form of trickery, and where he gained a reputation for a journalist's flair at meeting tight deadlines.  A known figure, with credits in Detective Story Magazine, the parent of the "shadowy" radio show, and a fast writer, his timing in entering Blackwell's office could not have been better.  Faced with a tight deadline -- Blackwell had been given sixty days to put the new magazine on the news stands -- he asked Gibson to produce a manuscript in half that time.  The author agreed, and that evening he began The Living Shadow.  It was the first of 282 such novels he wrote in the next 18 years.

Gibson always denied that he was a formula writer, but there is no question that he was a format writer.  A Street & Smith reader who picked up any of that firm’s pulps knew in advance what to expect.  A full issue totaled roughly 75,0000 words -- containing either one novel, two novellas, or a group of short stories.  A full length novel consisted of 30 chapters; each chapter of roughly 2000 words, and hence each novel of 60,000.   Caught up in introducing the major characters, Gibson pushed his first novel to 37 chapters and 75,000 words; his editors quickly helped him revert to the approved format, from which he never again departed.

There was, of course, no guarantee when Gibson began that there would be more than a few novels.  Pulps, especially in the 1930's, had a tendency to come and go quickly based upon circulation figures.  Because most circulation was from news stand sales, rather than from mail subscription, there was no cushion of annual subscribers to protect the title whose sales, especially in New York City, faltered in two or three consecutive issues.  Street & Smith initially decided to risk four issues of The Shadow, A Detective Magazine (as it was originally titled) and to sell the first issue as a quarterly in order to gauge sales.  Subject to editorial approval of each manuscript as it arrived, Gibson was offered the first four.

True to his intense work patterns, he produced them at a rate of one a month.  He also established his pattern of association with Street & Smith.  Assigned to John Nanovic, an associate editor, Gibson would begin each novel by preparing a detailed outline.  The contents never varied.  First, he would provide a summary of the background, highlighting the atmosphere and the colorful event or events around which the action would revolve.  Then he would list the characters of the tale, noting the motivation that each brought to the story.  Third, he would provide an overview of the action, describing the points of dramatic conflict that would occur during the mystery.  Finally, he would list the specific contents of each chapter in a short paragraph that stressed linkages and plot twists.  Each outline would be followed by a conference to review the outline and to avoid dead-ends that might necessitate extensive re-writes.  As Gibson and Nanovic became familiar with one another, and with the continuing characters of the series, the conferences became routine -- but were always held (often covering several novels at a time) before Gibson would start writing.

Initially there were a variety of the types of problem that often bedevil new enterprises.  In their rush to meet a sixty day deadline, the art department at Street & Smith was told to produce a suitable cover.  Hearing only the word shadow, they promptly created a cover showing a man in Chinese costume casting his own stark outline upon the wall.  Since Gibson had set much of the story's action in uptown Manhattan, a hastily called conference led to a rewrite that shifted the action of one chapter to New York's Chinatown.  Gibson himself remembered the month after he had submitted his first four titles, when his friend Blackstone had offered him a trip to Bermuda in exchange for promoting the magician's shows.  Arriving after most hotels were filled, he was greeted with a room across the street from a noisy construction project -- and a telegram from Nanovic at Street & Smith approving a fifth Shadow story on the gangs of Chicago.  Said Gibson,

"Fortunately, my newspaper training had inured me to such interruption.  In this case I transformed the Bermuda scene into a side street in Chicago, where fake workmen were doing a phony riveting job to drown out the rattle of machine-gun fire delivered by mobbies stations below, who were raking the cars of a rival big shot and his henchmen as they rolled by.  It gave the jitters just to walk past the Bermuda building, but it helped the story ...."

The telegram that Gibson received in Bermuda in 1931 was implicit recognition that The Shadow was proving a success.  The first and second issues each sold out in barely a month, and by the time the third reached the stands it proudly proclaimed itself a monthly.  A year later it went twice monthly, necessitating twenty-four novels a year -- a total of 1,440,000 words.  Gibson was about to become a legend in pulp publishing.

The sheer volume of his work first attracts attention.  Over 280 stories (plus two collaborations) in 18 years adds up to about 17 million words.  Although he first typed on an Underwood, the introduction of the single shift on the 1932 Corona made it his instrument of choice (in addition to later gaining an endorsement contract for him as he praised the sturdiness of the machine).  He eventually traveled routinely with two machines so that he always had one working if the other was being repaired.  His daily production averaged 5000 words; he once produced a 60,000 word final draft in 4 days.

He did it because The Shadow remained one of the major successes of pulp publishing.  Each issue by the mid-1930's sold in excess of 200,000 copies in a business where 5,000 was considered break-even. The magazine was still a success in 1936, the five year anniversary when most pulps went into decline -- and it continued a major success until at least 1943.  Looking back today we need to ask what accounts for that success.

One simple possibility was that it passed the first key test of a successful newsstand product with flying colors -- it had some of the most striking cover illustrations of the era.  Most were produced by George Rozen, who enjoyed a reputation in the New York area that rivaled Gibson's and that caused the artist's Long Island street to be renamed Shadow Lane by local authorities.  Rozen's illustrations were studies in bold primary colors, in explosive moments of violence or menace, and in character studies of the strange physiognomy of the Shadow.  The sinister laugh of the radio original had been reinforced by a continuing sketch on the inside cover of the magazine showing a starkly drawn man in a slouch hat.  Although the sketch was actually of editor Blackwell, it became identified with the title character of the novels and would surface on several of Rozen's better covers.

After Rozen's era, many of the later covers of the 1940's were products of Graves Gladney -- who enjoyed adding touches of New York street scenes as backgrounds, and who, in one outstanding cover, portrayed the hero blazing away with his automatic from behind a news stand piled high with Shadow magazines while a villain disguised as a newsboy attempted to sap our hero from behind.  Street & Smith rewarded the success of both magazine and artists by allowing additional color plates in the printing process, introducing unusual silver and gold backgrounds, and making these mint condition covers among the most desirable collectibles of the pulp era.

Once the cover drew the reader in, the editors attempted to build product loyalty by the usual devices of the time.  Interior illustrations abounded, produced by a series of illustrators -- several of whom built successful careers as commercial artists.  These black and white illustrations lent themselves to the images of light and Shadow, and were at their best in the late 1930's when Edd Cartier was casting the hero in world of weird menace.   Contests offered the opportunity to match wits with the hero, an editor's introduction sought to create a sense of dialogue with the audience, and Shadow Club rings (ten cents to cover postage and handling) appeared to two forms.  But in the final analysis, much of the success has to rest with the stories that Gibson, writing under the pen name of Maxwell Grant, created.  Let's look at his approaches.

Gibson incorporated a number of his interests into the series:
 --  An author of crosswords and other puzzles, he enjoyed introducing cryptograms and ciphers into his tales (a technique often followed by Rozen in his cover illustrations).  Sometimes an opportunity for the hero to display his cunning rationality, sometimes a red herring to carry a weaker plot line, they played to the secrecy that only "the Shadow knows."
 --  A journalist concerned with descriptive language, Gibson was fond of introducing exotic locations (more often within the bowels of the great cities than at the ends of the earth).  His plot outlines to Nanovic often were accompanied by lengthy research notes  on fetes and festivals; his tales often set in the midst of a Mardi Gras, or a Chinese New Year.  The Shadow's distinctive physical mark was the girasol, or fire opal, that he wore on his third finger.  One interesting consequence was that the great cities were not places of light and joy in most of the novels.  They were instead, as they often appeared in other literature of the 1930's, places that mingled glitter with darkness and despair; where life, like the hero, could emerge or disappear as easily as a shadow.
 --  An author fascinated with language, Gibson considered word choice to be a key to his stories, notably in his choice of names.  He was particularly fond of mixing the names of friends and associates, of using the titles of famous illusions as names, and of selecting names that created a sense of color, or of tension, to heighten the effect of a story.  His pen name of Maxwell Grant was drawn from two prominent magic dealers, Maxwell Holden, and U. F. Grant.  The Chinese gentleman in the first cover got his name from the illusion of the boxes of Wang Foo (where tea can be placed in one box only to appear in another).  A color is found in over a third of the three word titles of the novels; words of menace in almost half.  His writing reflects the same tendencies.
 --  His sense of  mystery and indirection, by the way, is particularly apparent in the way he dealt with the character of the Shadow.  Although individuals who know the character only through the later radio show may express surprise, the Shadow was not wealthy man-about-town Lamont Cranston.  Instead, Cranston was merely one of several individuals who were to discover that the Shadow had adopted their persona as part of his constant effort to confuse and distract the forces of evil and the underworld.  To the extent that a final persona was ever revealed, he appeared in August, 1937, in The Shadow Unmasks, as Kent Allard, a famed explorer and pilot whom many had believed lost in the Yucatan.
 --  Perhaps most obvious, the stories employed Gibson's interest in magic, and the magical stage of the 1930's.  It's hard to read the stories today without thinking about blue smoke and mirrors.  The hero, or his agents, are forever emerging out of (or disappearing into) mist, steam, fog, or rain.  The villains are constantly housed in buildings beset with secret passages, trick locks and entrances, false walls and partitions, and two way mirrors.  Costume is a way of life in the series, for heroes and villains alike, as they seek to district our gaze from the main chance.  Hypnotism plays less a role in the novels than it would in the later radio series, but mind games are always present.  The electronic magic of radio owed much to the stage magic of Gibson's fertile career.

To this list of items predictable from Gibson's own background, we should probably add other elements that Gibson regularly wove into his tales.
 --  He was intrigued by the new technology of the era, and often wove it into his tales.  The Shadow often communicated with his agents by radio from his own secret center; he rode in a gyro capable of landing on the tops of tall buildings; he employed the latest explosives as easily as he wore the latest styles.
 --  Gibson also understood the fascination with life styles of the rich and famous, and surrounded his characters with them.  Country estates, town houses, night clubs, board rooms, art galleries, and all the trappings of wealth surrounded his characters.
 --  Simultaneously, he showed skill in crafting his lesser characters.  It's to be remembered that the Shadow often acted through agents, who were the real stars of the early novels and who could be allowed to replace the Shadow whenever variety was needed to escape the constraints of format or formula.  The first loyal agent, and the most familiar to readers, was youthful, persuasive Harry Vincent -- whom the Shadow rescued from suicide, and from boredom, in the first adventure.  Others included Burbank, the Shadow's electronic contact; Joe Cardona, an agent in the Police Department before the appointment of Commissioner Ralph Weston; Clyde Burke, a reporter and researcher; and Cliff Marsland, consigned to the underworld by falsely accusations, where he could match the most dastardly criminal in violence.
 --  Gibson had a journalist's ability to sense popular moods and trends, and was quick to incorporate many of them into his tales.  Two stand out in the 1930's.  The first was organized crime.  Gibson wrote at the end of the prohibition era, when sporadic enforcement activities had combined with the zeal of temperance reformers to publicize the bootlegger and his gangland connections to a public that was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by it all.  The second influence was what an earlier generation called the "yellow peril."  Both the Chinese civil wars of the 1920's and the Japanese incursions and invasions of the 1930's -- beginning with Manchuria -- did much to confirm a popular fascination with the violence and the strangeness of the orient.  Many of Gibson's titles serve to remind us of both:  Gangdom's Doom, Mobsmen on the Spot, Kings of Crime, and Racket Town for the former; The Chinese Tapestry, Teeth of the Dragon, Shiwan Khan Returns, and The Golden Pagoda for the latter.
 --  Gibson, of course, was writing within the a genre of fiction, and within a competitive world of publishing, that encouraged this tendency.  The inspiration for the Shadow arose out of detective fiction, the oriental villain in popular imagination was at least as old a Fu Manchu, and the weird menace was a favored form of pulp publication by the late 1930's.

Gibson, in short, was a success because he was good at what many were doing -- not because he was doing something no one else had thought to do.  He certainly saw it that way, arguing in his autobiography that the key to his success lay in his intricate plots that carried the reader through twists and turns of action and mystery that never repeated themselves in the same way in any two novels.

You, no doubt, are doing to ask why I haven't added another obvious element in the Shadow package: the radio tie-in.  The answer is that it's a sufficiently complicated tale that it deserves special mention on its own.  The first Shadow, remember, was there to promote Detective Story Hour in 1930.  The early novels were also quick to promote the tie-in.  Here's a section from The Living Shadow.

There were those, of course, who claimed they had heard his voice coming through the spaceless ether over the radio.  But at the broadcasting studio, The Shadow's identity had been carefully guarded.  He was said to have been allowed a special room, hung with curtains of heavy, black velvet, along a twisting corridor.  There he faced the unseeing microphone, masked and robed.

You would think, given the publishing success of Street & Smith, that they would be quick to repackage their show.

Surprisingly, they were not.  The same corporate caution that we've seen in many aspects of the magazine was also present in advertising.  Fundamentally, the problem was the cost of sponsorship.  Street & Smith wanted a situation where their contribution would be the Shadow stories, and a credit to their magazine, while another commercial sponsor would absorb the cost of the show's transmission to the Round Robin.  They found Blue Coal, which would remain with them until the collapse of the anthracite market in 1949.

But Blue Coal posed a problem in the early 1930's: they liked the show as they found it, with a narrator reading a variety of storied from the current pulps, as well as chatting with "John Barclay, Blue Coal's distinguished heating expert" (played by actors Tim Frawley and later Paul Huber).   The theory was clear: a diversity of stories best satisfies a diverse audience.  The result was that while Gibson and Nanovic were successfully crafting a character magazine, the original Shadow was, in effect, hosting a variety show.  With Frank Readick, Jr., replacing LaCurto early in 1931, the Shadow hosted in succession, Detective Story Hour, The Blue Coal Radio Review, Love Story Drama, and Love Story Hour, in the next two years.  When the show was finally titled The Shadow in 1932, it still retained the format of varied stories -- and limped along that way until it was pulled from the air to allow Street & Smith and Blue Coal a period of over a year to debate what to do.  Only in September, 1937, after 133 issues of the magazine had appeared, did the radio show (as most remember it) finally reach the microphone.

The contractual arrangement that brought the show back was clearly a compromise.  The programs employed the Shadow as the central character, and were entitled to use the plots of published novels -- but were not limited to that source.   Authors independent of Street & Smith would write the weekly episodes, subject to approval by Blue Coal and by Street & Smith.   The show would be produced on the Mutual network (where earlier versions had been on NBC), using talent recruited in New York by the advertising agency representing Blue Coal.  Compared to earlier arrangements, it was clearly a victory for the publisher.

The author chosen to write the initial shows was Edward Hale Bierstadt, a veteran radio writer best known for the Warden Lawes show -- which had provided listeners crime and punishment tales set in Sing Sing Prison.  Bierstadt professed to be a lover of The Shadow magazine, and never had serious problems getting his outlines approved by Gibson or his scripts by Nanovic.  But he soon altered the direction Gibson had followed.
 --  First, Bierstadt changed the basic persona of the hero.  Where Lamont Cranston was merely one of several identities adopted in the magazine, he became the true identity of the radio show.  Where the hero of Gibson's stories cloaked himself by costume and by atmosphere, Bierstadt's character possessed "the hypnotic power to cloud men's minds so they cannot see him."
 --  Second, where Gibson's novels generally assigned the love interest to one of the Shadow's agents, most commonly Harry Vincent, Bierstadt assigned it to Cranston himself in the person of "his friend and companion, the lovely Margo Lane," a character who had never appeared in print.
 --  And third, where Gibson's villains had generally been larger than life characters heading vast criminal enterprises, Bierstadt's tended to be products of the street crime of the late 1930's.  Much in the manner of Warden Lawes, the Shadow often visited death row, communicated with governors for last minute reprieves, and second guessed the criminal courts.  It's easy to argue that just as every radio actor learned how to fit his script into the precise time allotted each week, the Shadow was forced to do the same.
 --  Bierstadt, interestingly, found the series constricting.  (He had a desire to become a newspaper feature writer.)  A succession of others, including Sidney Slon, Jerry Devine, Alfred Bester, and Frank Kane, followed.  None seriously interfered with the formula they inherited, although they did show a tendency to subject Margo to every kind of danger a young woman could suffer on radio in the 1940's -- from rat-filled dungeons to the operating tables of sinister doctors.

Most of the attention given to the radio series today attaches to the initial group of actors chosen for the 1937-1938 season -- and particularly to Orson Welles.  The central figure of Broadway's Mercury Theater, and the future creator of both Citizen Kane and the Martian invasion scare, he was a twenty-two wunderkind with a fine radio voice and the ability to create the sinister tones and laughs of the Shadow.  "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit.  Crime does not pay.  The Shadow knows.  Heh. Heh. Heh."   Accompanied by Agnes Moorehead, who stayed to play Margo Lane for three seasons, Welles did the first 40 broadcasts (25 in regular season for Blue Coal, 15 in the summer for Goodrich Tires.  "Bald tires cause thousands of traffic accidents.  The Shadow knows.")

He was succeeded by two other actors whose voices met the demanding tests of the opening lines.  "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows!"  Bill Johnstone held the role through 1943; Bret Morrison -- the voice most people know today from the commercial tapes commonly marketed by nostalgia firms -- played the role until the end of the series in December, 1954.  The actresses who played Margo are too numerous to mention -- perhaps reflecting the strain of a damsel in constant peril.

The radio show, I've discovered, was only one of several spin-offs that Street & Smith began to develop or franchise in the 1930's.  Another was the cinema.  The same impulse that led to a tie-in with radio led to six short two-reelers produced by Universal as the Shadow Detective Series in 1931.  Like the initial radio show, our hero was merely the narrator for six different detective stories.  In 1937 and 1938, came two Grand National flicks, The Shadow Strikes and International Crime, both starring an actor better known from the silent era, Rod LaRocque.  The prominent role of Margo Lane, and the central character of Lamont Cranston (pronounced Granston in the 1937 title), proclaim the radio connections.  So too does the fact that in the 1938 show Cranston, finally pronounced correctly, is a radio crime reporter who never actually assumes the Shadow's identity on the screen.

The best known cinema Shadow is probably Victor Jory, who did a fifteen chapter serial, called simply The Shadow, in 1940.  More than any other actor to play the role, Jory looked the part of the magazine covers.  It's a classic serial in which the hero rescues Margo from locked closets and exploding radio stations, and personally survives blazing gasoline, exploding ammonia, crackling live wires, and a killer x-ray machine.  Three later B-movies done just after the war starring Kane Richmond -- The Shadow Returns, Behind the Mask, and The Missing Lady -- don't even come close.

The Shadow also made his way for a time onto the comic pages, in two incarnations.  The first to appear, and the longer-lived was a comic book produced by Street & Smith; the second, which flourished for barely two years, was a newspaper strip syndicated by the Philadelphia Ledger.
 --  The comic book reflected the continuing publicity efforts of Street & Smith to promote their magazines.  The firm resisted entering the comics field seriously because of a corporate policy of doing printing in-house, and because they lacked the necessary equipment to do four-color comics.  But the desire to promote magazine sales, and the fear of competition from rival publishers, eventually led to the first comic issue in 1940.  Gibson, that wonderful fiction factory, adapted a number of his novels over the next six years for a series of artists.
 --  A separate newspaper comic strip apparently originated in Gibson's own ties to the Philadelphia Ledger, which had begun to syndicate his crossword puzzles in the early 1920's.  Discussing opportunities with his editor, Gibson set in motion a separate comic strip, drawn by Vernon Lee, parts of which were later republished in the comic book.  The strip died with Lee's induction into selective service, the comic book faded as sales of the magazine faded in the 1940's.

Yet the very mention of the 1940's is cause for a shift in emphasis, for that's the decade in which the Shadow faded.  The spin-offs, as I've indicated in discussing comics and movies, were never that popular, and never seen as anything except advertising for the magazine.  Now the magazine itself now began to fade.  Street & Smith cut back from twice monthly to monthly in April of 1943.  They managed that schedule until January, 1947, when they went bi-monthly for a year and a half.  Then, in the fall of 1948, they went quarterly, producing four final issues that concluded with the Summer, 1949, number 325.

In the same year, Blue Coal ceased its l7 year association with the radio show.  A succession of sponsors -- Grove Laboratories, the U. S. Air Force, the Wildroot Company, Tide, No-Doz, and Camel Cigarettes -- kept it going until 1953, and the Mutual Network itself served as a sustainer sponsor for one final year in 1954.  Then the radio show followed its magazine counterpart into the realm of memory, nostalgia, and occasional revival.

Since we spent the time to ask why the Shadow succeeded, we ought to take the time to ask why he failed.  Let's start with the usual interpretations that you encounter in most histories of popular entertainment.
 --  The commentators usually start with the bland assertion that TV was the villain.  The Shadow, they argue, relied upon the camera of the mind for his invisibility -- and wasn't suitable to the cameras of television, which never attempted to pick up the show as they did so many radio programs of the early 1950's.  Our hero, they contend, was as visually ineffectual as he had been in the cinema.

That's fine as far as it goes, but it dances around the fact that the radio show had always been perceived by Street & Smith as a vehicle to promote the magazine -- and the magazine had died five years before the radio show.  I believe you're more likely to understand the problem if you ask about the 1949 printing decision than if you cast television -- which wasn't a serious immediate threat to any entertainment form early in 1949 -- as an all-purpose villain.
 --  But here again there is the easy answer: the magazine had been affected by the shortages of World War Two.  The need to divert resources to war production required sacrifices by everyone, and the magazine's decline was a patriotic gesture.

Once again, it sounds good.  Anyone familiar with the sacrifices asked of the public in WW II by government can identify.  Sadly, many modern historians disagree.  Like John Morton Blum, in his fascinating study, V Was For Victory, they are quick to separate the rhetoric of sacrifice preached by government with the reality of consumption experienced by the public.  As Blum points out, there indeed were shortages -- but mostly of tropical and subtropical products such as rubber and bananas, of some durable goods such as refrigerators and automobiles, and of high technology products such as aluminum and uranium.  Moreover, he reminds us, the government placed a high value upon popular entertainment, and placed few impediments in the way of activities that buoyed civilian morale.  A pulp paper shortage, even allowing for GI toilet paper, is hard to accept as a real reason for production cutbacks.
 --  A better approach would be to take the competition question (which is normally used to explain radio’s demise) and recast it as a problem for the pulp publishers.  In other words, were they facing economic challenges they couldn't handle?  As it turns out, they were.  There were two of them, and they were related -- a news stand problem, and a direct competitor problem.

Let's start with the news stands.  I'm sure that when I mention them, you think of the images that come down to us in popular imagination and cinema: a small stand, covered with every imaginable title of newspaper and magazine, staffed by a feisty but likable gaffer speaking in a charming ethnic accent.  It's the epitome of small business of an earlier age.  It's also inaccurate.  Tell the true history of the news stand, and you are really telling the history of the American News Company.

American News was the country's major news stand distributor -- a wholesaler headquartered in New York with over 400 regional distribution centers answering to it.  Created, as its name suggests, to handle the distribution of major urban dailies at the turn of the century, it also carried the major weekly and monthly periodicals.  More important, it carried all of them on an exclusive basis.  No publisher could expect to appear on a stand supplied by American News if that publisher sent his material anywhere else.  Nor would it be easy to find good locations elsewhere.  American News possessed a wholly owned subsidiary, the Union News Company, that had made over 900 contracts with railroad terminals, large hotels, and other prime news stand locations -- all again with exclusivity.  Until it was broken by the courts as a "combination in restraint of trade" in 1954 and 1955, it was one of last surviving trusts of the early 20th century.

Its level of service was also a curse to many publishers.  Geared to newspapers and mass magazines, it offered less attention to such smaller publications as the pulps -- and, in particular, provided no return privileges.  No wonder that the word from news stand operators in New York City of actual sales figures was so important to Street & Smith in 1930: they never saw a copy after it went onto the back of an ANC truck, and hence could get no independent audit of sales figures.

There was, of course, an alternative that Street & Smith would turn to in the early 1930's -- the independent distributors.  Not quite as independent as their name suggested, they were actually a group of loosely structured associations of dealers who pooled their resources (and occasionally, as in Chicago, their muscle) to compete with American News and Union News.  Denied the big magazines, the independents stressed other titles: racing forms, men's magazines, and small publications (including many of the pulps).  The racy covers we associate with many pulps make much more sense when you remember the type of periodical they often shared the shelves with.  In good times the independent stand offered an outlet for sales, but when times turned bad or new competitors appeared, it meant that many of the pulps (which, like modern men's magazines, had very little in the way of mail order subscriptions) had a major distribution problem.

And that brings us to the competition: paperback books.  Today we buy them in book stores, but the paperback was originally a news stand publication.  It was developed in the 1930's by enterprising firms such as Pocket Books (and copied by such others as the American News Company's subsidiary, Avon Books) to capture what they considered the reading market of the future:  the more educated reader being graduated in increasing numbers from America's high schools (and in the l940's from the colleges as well).  The early paperback publishers were fond of including "serious" authors in their repertoire as a means of legitimizing their offerings.  Yet in many ways they were really targeting the pulp market.  Many of the early paperback authors, from Mickey Spillane to Earl Stanley Gardner, started their career in the pulps and wrote in the pulp style.  Many early paperback covers are just as colorful and racy as any that adorned a pulp magazine.  And every paperback bid for space on a news stand that once carried pulps.  Little wonder that every magazine publisher of the 1940's faced a competitor.  Some responded by turning to mail order, some by turning to their own paperback lines, some by cultivating specialty sales outlets.  Those who didn't adapt faded fast, and Street & Smith, with its vibrating magazine presses and suspicion of anything not done in house, was among the losers.

Commentators on public taste will, of course, add other possibilities.  In a business where it was acknowledged that five years was about the limit of public interest, the Shadow was clearly old and probably tired.  In a society where mobility was carrying people to the suburbs, and new mercury and sodium lights were dispelling the dark corners of all but the most vile and abandoned corners of the city, the visual imagery may have been wrong.  And in an era where new ideological enemies -- mostly Red -- were replaced the gangs and the yellow perils on the public agenda, the Shadow may have seemed old fashioned.  Yet my suspicion remains that his demise owed more to management and sales than most are willing to give credit.

What remains?  For those who enjoy that era, I can assure you there is a busy collectibles market.  (Shadow number one in good condition, or a good Shadow ring are still worth keeping in a lock box).  There are periodic revivals, sometimes on cassette tape and sometimes in paperback (the Belmont paperbacks have the best covers).  There are conventions for surviving fans -- Pulpcon in Dayton each summer is one of the best.  And there are always rumors that a Hollywood fascinated by special effects may some day try to do the Shadow as he should be done.

I'll argue, however, that the real legacy is the window that the pulps open to us to explore the 1930's -- a world made strangely familiar by its heroes and strangely foreign by its villains; a world where the discontinuities of popular entertainment remind us of the discontinuities of our own times.
 
 
 
 
 

Note:  The WWWeb contains a number of informative and entertaining pages that deal with the Shadow and the Pulps.  Try here for a useful starting point.
 
 

Note:  Viewers may enjoy looking at a small sample of the colorful covers that graced newsstands during that era.
A list is here.