Review: Gangland's Doom: The Shadow of the Pulps (50th Anniversary Edition) - Frank Eisgruber Jr.

I’ve been hearing about GANGLAND’S DOOM, the ground-breaking study of The Shadow by Frank Eisgruber Jr., for many years. By the time I got into pulp fandom in the early Eighties, the book’s original edition, published by Robert Weinberg, had been out for several years. It was reprinted later by Starmont House and Altus Press, but I never got around to picking up a copy and reading it.

When the fine folks at The Shadowed Circle decided to do a special 50^th Anniversary Edition, I got on board right away, knowing the quality of the work they do. And they certainly didn’t disappoint. I’ve just read the new edition of GANGLAND’S DOOM, and it’s fantastic.

This was one of the very first books of pulp scholarship. Eisgruber takes a good look at The Shadow’s true identity, the various false identities he employed in his war against crime, the many agents and helpers who also enlisted in that war, the great villains against whom The Shadow and his organization battled, and the multitude of settings used in the almost 400 novels in the pulp series. He covers as well the three main authors of the saga, Walter B. Gibson, Theodore Tinsley, and Bruce Elliott, and this new edition provides several appendixes, correspondence between Eisgruber and fellow Shadow expert Will Murray, and an interview with him.

Will long-time Shadow fans learn much that’s new in this volume? Well, probably not much. Numerous other books have been published that delve deeply into the history of the character, not to mention the many articles from the journal THE SHADOWED CIRCLE and earlier pulp fanzines. But is GANGLAND’S DOOM well-written, informative, and highly entertaining? It absolutely is. I don’t know of any Shadow fan who wouldn’t greatly enjoy this affectionate look at a favorite character.

And I did come across one idea I’d never encountered before, at least as far as I recall. Eisgruber discusses—and rightfully dismisses—Philip José Farmer’s speculation that the flying spy G-8, The Spider, and The Shadow were all the same man. I don’t buy that for a second, but Eisgruber mentions an alternate possibility, that following World War I, G-8 became the detective and master of disguise Secret Agent X, and I can believe that. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it seems feasible to me. (Using the word “true” loosely, of course, since we are talking about pulp characters . . .)

As for the book itself, it’s beautifully produced. You’d expect no less from editor/publisher Steve Donoso and his associates. I was a Kickstarter backer and got my copy that way, but it’s available on Amazon in a hardcover edition with a cover and illustrations by Joseph Booth (the edition I read) and a paperback with a cover by Marcin Nowacki. There’s also a Kindle edition. You can also buy the print editions and plenty of other great Shadow material directly from the publisher, which is always an excellent option. If you’re a fan of The Shadow, I can’t recommend this one highly enough. It’s a great book and one of the best I’ve read so far this year.

Dark Avenger: The Strange Saga of The Shadow - Will Murray

One of the first books I ever bought about pulps was THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE by Will Murray, an author/editor/pulp fan who I probably met through our mutual friend Tom Johnson. This was more than 40 years ago, so some of the details have slipped my memory. But I was a big fan of The Shadow, having listened to the radio shows, read all the original novels published by Belmont (having no idea at the time that they were written by Dennis Lynds, another guy who would become a friend years later) and all the reprinted pulp novels from Bantam, Pyramid, Jove, Tempo, Dover, etc. So I dived into THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE with great enthusiasm and was well-rewarded. I loved it. It’s one of the all-time best books about pulps, in my opinion. Plus it’s a beautiful oversized paperback with a great cover by Frank Hamilton.

Of course, my copy was lost in the Fire of ’08 and I never got around to replacing it.

But now we come to today, and Will Murray’s latest book DARK AVENGER: THE STRANGE SAGA OF THE SHADOW. This is a greatly revised and expanded version of THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE and includes all the information Murray gleaned from the past forty-some-odd years of research. I opened it with the same enthusiasm I felt four decades ago and wasn’t the least bit disappointed. This is the best, most exhaustive volume about a single pulp magazine ever written.

Anything you want to know about THE SHADOW MAGAZINE is in here. The authors are covered extensively (mostly Walter B. Gibson, of course, but there’s plenty about Theodore Tinsley, Bruce Elliott, and Lester Dent, as well), as well as the editors and illustrators and the Street & Smith executives who were involved in the magazine’s production. The entire run of 325 novels is broken down into distinct categories, and Murray explores how they were written, how the series evolved, and the various influences that caused that evolution. He touches on the various versions of The Shadow after the pulp ended, but this is mostly about the 18-year run between 1931 and 1949. Rightly so, as far as I’m concerned since the pulp Shadow is my favorite.

The cover of this new edition is by Joe DeVito, who has done great covers for many of Murray’s books in recent years. I really like this one because it captures The Shadow’s personality quite well and also includes Myra Reldon, one of The Shadow’s agents from the novels who usually isn’t featured in artwork about the character and the pulp. An excellent job all around by DeVito. The book also includes a lot of the interior illustrations by Frank Hamilton from the earlier edition. I always loved Hamilton’s work and am very pleased to see these illustrations again. They really bring back a bygone era of pulp fandom filled with printed fanzines and books like THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE.

Even if you’re a fan of The Shadow and read the original version, you’re going to want to read the new edition, too. I raced through it, unable to put it down, having the time of my life reliving memories of the Shadow novels I’ve read and being reminded of all the great ones still waiting for me to read. Between the great journal THE SHADOWED CIRCLE and the books devoted to the character by Will Murray, this is the new Golden Age of Shadow Fandom. DARK AVENGER gets my highest recommendation. It’s available in both e-book and trade paperback editions.

Forgotten Books: One is a Lonely Number - Bruce Elliott/Black Wings Has My Angel - Elliott Chaze

The latest double reprint volume from Stark House is a study in both contrasts and similarities. Let's get some of the similarities out of the way first.

The authors, Bruce Elliott and Elliott Chaze, have a name in common, obviously. Both novels are noirish, hardboiled crime yarns originally published in the Fifties. And both are very, very good.

But the two authors have very different backgrounds. Bruce Elliott was a stage magician who wrote books on that subject in addition to turning out pulp novels and working as an editor on various magazines. Elliott Chaze was a small-town journalist in the South who had a long career as a newspaper reporter and editor as well as being a novelist.

ONE IS A LONELY NUMBER was originally published by Lion Books in 1952, BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL by Gold Medal in 1953. Both novels spent decades in obscurity, but in different ways. BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL was famously obscure, if you know what I mean. Unlike most Gold Medal novels from that era, it was extremely difficult to find, as Bill Crider points out in his introduction to this reprint. A number of articles were written about how good it was, one of the very best novels ever published by Gold Medal, but most fans had never read it and held out few hopes of ever reading it because it was so rare. ONE IS A LONELY NUMBER was just flat-out obscure, a Forgotten Book if ever there was one. I've been reading this sort of stuff for more than forty years now, and I'd never even heard of it until Stark House announced this edition. As Ed Gorman says in his introduction, "I have no idea how a novel this good could have been around for more than sixty years without hardboiled readers being aware of it." I can only echo that comment.

As for the books themselves . . .

ONE IS A LONELY NUMBER is the story of Larry Camonille, an escaped convict who's trying to get to Mexico because he has tuberculosis and thinks he'll live longer in the warm, dry air. One of his lungs has already been removed in the prison hospital before he broke out, and the other one is in bad shape. I don't think Elliott ever mentions what Larry's crime was, but it's established that he's a former musician (a trumpet player) and that he's never killed anyone. In need of money, he takes a job as a dishwasher in a small rural roadhouse, and wouldn't you know it, two beautiful women wind up interested in him, one older, one dangerously younger. And as Larry eventually discovers, both of them have plans for him, plans involving crimes that could send him back to prison or even get him killed.

Larry is about as unsympathetic a protagonist as you could find, but to Elliott's great credit, he makes the reader care about Larry despite that. The plot twists and turns with great skill, and Elliott's prose is fast and lean, just like it should be. The atmosphere of doom that hangs over this novel is powerful, and to quote Gorman again, "Even Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis would find this book a downer." Larry Camonille never really gives up in his struggle to be free, though, and I think that's what makes him oddly admirable in spite of his flaws. Because of all this, I found ONE IS A LONELY NUMBER to be one of the best noir novels I've ever read.

Now, moving on to BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL, when you finally get your hands on a book you've heard great things about for years or even decades, a book you figured you'd probably never get to read, there's always a nagging worry that it's not going to live up to its reputation. That was certainly true in my case when I started BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL.

Luckily, it didn't take me long to realize that wasn't going to be a problem. This book also concerns an escaped convict, and of course he meets a beautiful woman. Only one, though, in BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL, and the crime that gets them both into deep trouble is the narrator's idea, not the blonde's.

I'm not really a fan of Chaze's dense prose. The long, long paragraphs and the scarcity of dialogue at times bother me. I'm accustomed to much leaner, faster, and more hardboiled writing in this sort of novel, and that's what works best for me. Where Chaze excels, though, is in his characterization. The relationship between Tim and Virginia is the dominant factor in this novel, and it's developed in very powerful fashion. They love each other, they hate each other, they fight, they scheme together, they certainly don't trust each other. The reader never really knows what's going to happen next, and that sense of things being off-kilter is what makes BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL such a fine novel.

Taken together, this is one of the best volumes Stark House has published so far. ONE IS A LONELY NUMBER is the better of the two books, I think, but they're both well worth reading and if you're a fan of noir fiction and haven't ordered this one yet, you definitely should.