Brian Leno greets me this morning with a puzzler.
“A little quiz for the Mean Streets, Don: Which of these three does not belong?”
The reboot or reimagining or defunding of The Shadow by James Patterson came out the other day. I had thought about giving it a shot, and then I saw the cover. The only thought I could process was Where the fuck is HIS HAT???
Someone in our ragtag little group will have to at least skim the new book to see how bad it is (I volunteer Leno), but each new report and rumor provides less hope.
Tom Krabacher just told me, “I’ve heard that in addition to not wearing his slouch hat — plus now toting around a teen-age sidekick — the Patterson Shadow goes about unarmed and DOES NOT carry his brace of .45’s. This is getting so d*mned sacrilegious. . . .”
I realize the book probably will make money, but why bother?
No hat and no guns, that’s not The Shadow.
My prediction as of this moment is that Jack Kerouac did a much hotter version in his tribute to the Shadow pulp, written while staying with William S. Burroughs in Mexico City in 1952: Doctor Sax.
If you’re going to completely rework the character, make something like literature out of it.
