The crew at The Shadowed Circle magazine just released a commemorative 50th anniversary edition of a landmark in Shadow studies. You’ll remember that in addition to the magazine not long ago they brought out the excellent omnibus The Shadowed Circle Compendium, so obviously they are the hot current players in rounding up Shadow lore and history.
I’ve owned a copy of Gangland’s Doom by Frank Eisgruber Jr. for several decades now. I don’t think I got it straight off the presses in 1974, but ended up with one soon enough and have lugged it around with me ever since. Your essential intro to The Shadow of the pulp magazines, with a nice cover by Franklin E. Hamilton. Sure, I could have given it to someone else along the way or traded it for something. But I like it. And after all these years, it is useful — laying out the info on the various identities The Shadow assumed, his little army of agents, and the legion of sinister villains he faced. A list of The Shadow issues, pub dates, title of each adventure contained. In an era when some guy new to the pulp hero Just Didn’t Know, here you go: the first reference book.
“Hopefully,” the bookseller Robert Weinberg — and later book author and comics scripter — said in his 1974 preface, “this booklet will be the first of a number devoted to the pulps of the thirties and forties.” Weinberg published an extensive run of booklets, as well as little magazines such as The Weird Tales Collector. Someone must have done a bibliography by now. High points for me would be the chapbooks containing Tales of the Werewolf Clan by H. Warner Munn (collected in time by Donald M. Grant in two deluxe hardcover volumes).
Slim, not even a quarter of an inch thick, the text was done on a typewriter and shrunk down — obviously trying to keep it cheap so the next booklets might follow.
Still, a classic was born.
The 50th Anniversary edition benefits from years of advances in printing technology. Larger font. Color covers.
It reprints the original contents but adds such flourishes as a new intro by pulp historian Will Murray — and includes two letters Eisgruber wrote to Murray in 1978 and 1980, as Will was near the beginning of his now long career. By the way, an updated intro by Eisgruber lets us know what he thought of the recent James Patterson “Shadow.”
Of his effort Eisgruber states, “You want information, facts, etc., you’ve got it. You want grand style and psychology — not in Gangland’s Doom.”
(And may I add that on this topic I’m not just another guy mouthing off — I know what it means to do a landmark book is such studies. My 1984 book on Robert E. Howard, The Dark Barbarian, just marked its 40th anniversary last year. I’m confident it’ll get to 50 years. Maybe not 100. . . .)
