Check out that great Chinatown alley.
Can’t you just see Lon Chaney as a vicious legless Lord of the Underworld creeping over the stone bricks, enrapt in savage dreams of subjugating the city?
But Chaney kept his lair in San Francisco’s Chinatown, circa 1920, and the picture above is Charles Lane, 1938, in New York City’s Chinatown.
The mean streets turf haunted by The Shadow.
I’m a fool for the city, the 1920s Frisco gumshoed by the Continental Op, the London of Sherlock Holmes, evocations of a near mystical past.
Would film noir appeal half as much if it didn’t catch all those glimpses of lost cityscapes?
And so the extensive spread of historic photos in “The Shadow’s New York” — giving the real world views of where those pulp adventures took place — instantly seized my eye and automatically became my favorite feature in The Shadowed Circle Compendium.
An omnibus of 17 articles taken from the pages of the first 7 issues of The Shadowed Circle, the latest magazine devoted to the mysterious crimefighter, this book also includes 6 all-new pieces. I realized even on an initial look that if you knew nothing about The Shadow, you could poke around in it for awhile and come out the other side completely conversant. Blazing twin automatics. A run of 325 pulp issues (providing lots of full color to jump it up). Under the house name Maxwell Grant the prolific Walter B. Gibson writing 282 (!) of those short novels. The radio show. Orson Welles. Comic books (more color to grab the eye). History and mystery.
“On the Set of The Shadow” by Will Murray is another highlight — his memoir of being hired by a film mag to cover the making of the 1994 release The Shadow starring Alec Baldwin. Lots of detail. Ian McKellan comes across as a cool guy (he knew the bust of The Shadow they were manufacturing needed a hatband — of course it did). I liked the movie pretty well, give or take a few elements. But even my maniacal Shadow fan pal John C. Moran agreed with me that the Shadow effects when the caped avenger comes out of the darkness, automatics bucking in his black-gloved hands, were — well, definitive.
“The Shadowed Seven” may be the most useful feature of the Compendium — where 21 writers, scholars and fans are limited to 7 selections for their top Shadow stories. Among them James Reasoner, a modern neo-pulpster from Texas I encountered at a Robert E. Howard Days celebration in Cross Plains, Texas. James does a lot of novels under various house names and when I met him had around 200 novels — mostly paperback originals — under his belt. Last time I heard, a few years later, he was hovering around novel 400. By now, who knows, he may be over 500 — or 600. I get tired just thinking about it.
I’m going to go over the selections again and again, taking notes. I’ve read at least 40 or 50 Shadows. Every now and then I do a little binge, and I ought to make sure I cover the top-rated episodes. Although when I read “Crime, Insured” I was confident I’d reached a peak — The Shadow tracked to his sanctum sanctorum by gangdom and besieged. Whoa. But if more are out there just as good, I need to track them down, bring them to my sanctum sanctorum, and besiege them — maybe I’ll even wear my slouch hat.
The Shadowed Circle Compendium can be had off Amazon, but you can get copies cheaper if you order direct from the magazine.
