Forgotten Books: The Man From Scotland Yard - Maxwell Grant (Walter B. Gibson)

I hadn't read a Shadow novel in quite a while and was in the mood for one, so I picked a story that I'd heard was pretty good, THE MAN FROM SCOTLAND YARD, which appeared in the August 1, 1935 issue of THE SHADOW. It turned out to be a decent choice, but before I talk about that, I'm going to wallow a bit in nostalgia. Consider yourself warned.

I have a long history with The Shadow. I first encountered the character in syndicated reruns of the radio show back in the early 1960s. I thoroughly enjoyed them, although I had no idea at the time of the character's pulp origins. A few years later, on the paperback spinner rack in Tompkins' Drugstore, I came across the Belmont edition of THE SHADOW STRIKES, the first original Shadow novel by Dennis Lynds, writing under the house-name Maxwell Grant. Of course, I didn't know then that Lynds wrote it, and I certainly never would have guessed that years later he and I would become friends through correspondence. All I knew was that I loved the book and thought this version of the character was even better than the one in the radio show. Lynds wrote more Shadow novels for Belmont over the next few years, and I snatched them all up as I found them and read them with eagerness and great enjoyment.

(A little background: When Belmont began this new series of Shadow paperbacks, the first one, RETURN OF THE SHADOW, was written by Walter B. Gibson, who created the character and wrote the vast majority of the pulp novels. I didn't find that one and read it until several years later. When the arrangement with Gibson didn't work out, Belmont turned to Lynds to continue the series. This was a very busy time for Lynds. Not only was he writing the Shadow paperbacks, he was also writing all the Mike Shayne novelettes and novellas in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, many of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. novellas in the digest of the same name, and starting his long-running series of award-winning, critically acclaimed novels about one-armed private eye Dan Fortune under the name Michael Collins. He certainly didn't stint on his Shadow novels, though, at least not to my mind at the time. I've never reread any of them, but I'd like to if I could find the time.)

Moving on, a few more years went by, and I found the Bantam paperback reprint of THE LIVING SHADOW, the first novel in the pulp series from 1931. I still remember reading it while sitting on the front porch of my aunt's house in Blanket, Texas, seemingly unable to turn the pages fast enough to keep up with the excitement of the tale. This was the best Shadow so far.

By then I had encountered Doc Savage and learned some about the pulps. While The Shadow never replaced Doc as my favorite from that era, I read all the paperbacks published by Bantam and then later by Pyramid and Jove, many of the latter with great covers by the legendary Jim Steranko. By that time I was in college, attending what was then North Texas State University in Denton. One summer when I was commuting from my home in Azle, about 50 miles away, the vagaries of the schedule meant that I had one class early in the morning and another late in the afternoon, with a big block of time in the middle of the day to kill. It was too far to go home and come back. Most days I spent that time in the basement of the library, sitting in one of the study carrels 'way in the back, behind the stacks. Did I study? Heck, no. I smuggled in food and drink and sat there in near-isolation reading paperbacks, and the ones I remember most vividly are those Shadow novels with Steranko covers. (I now realize that I actually was studying for what turned out to be my career, I just didn't know it at the time. What better preparation could there be, though, for writing hundreds of over-the-top action novels than reading the novels of Walter B. Gibson and all the other pulpsters whose work I was devouring back then?)

In the 40 years since, I've read many, many Shadow novels, some in reprint and quite a few in the original pulps. I remember sitting in the hospital reading a Shadow pulp right after our first daughter was born, while Livia and Shayna were both sleeping. THE SHADOW ran from 1931 to 1949, and the quality of the series breaks pretty neatly in the middle. The stories from the 1930s are consistently good to excellent, although there are some mediocre entries in the bunch. The 1940s stories are just the opposite: some gems here and there, but mostly bland, uninspiring little mysteries. No criminal super-masterminds, no hordes of vicious gangsters being mowed down by The Shadow's .45s, no apocalyptic action scenes.

So where does THE MAN FROM SCOTLAND YARD fit in? Sort of in the middle. The main plot concerns a gang of international spies who are out to steal some weapons plans and sell them to an unnamed power in Europe. (Cough*Germany*cough.) It's somewhat interesting but not that compelling. But there's a great scene where The Shadow lands his autogyro on the deck of the bad guys' ship in the middle of the Atlantic and goes to town with those .45 automatics. A few other action scenes are pretty good, but overall there aren't as many of them as in some of the novels, and The Shadow is off-screen a lot. Quite a bit of the story consists of guys standing in hotel rooms talking.

However, through a very neat bit of trickery, Gibson sets up a situation where the reader doesn't know if one of the characters is really a hero, a villain, a hero pretending to be a villain, or vice versa. It takes almost the entire novel for that conundrum to be resolved, and I enjoyed being puzzled. THE MAN FROM SCOTLAND YARD doesn't reach the operatic heights of some of the early novels, but it's considerably better than most of the ones I've read from the Forties. It was reprinted a while back in one of those double editions with ZEMBA, a novel that's considered by many fans to be one of the best in the whole series. That edition seems to be out of print, but I imagine copies can be found at various places on-line. I enjoyed THE MAN FROM SCOTLAND YARD enough that I plan to read another Shadow novel fairly soon.

Monday Morning Digest Magazine: The Man From U.N.C.L.E., February 1966

As a huge fan of the TV series THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., I can't tell you how excited I was to walk into Lester's Pharmacy one day after school to pick up my week's supply of comic books, only to find the first issue of this magazine on the rack there. Luckily I had enough allowance money to buy it without having to give up any comics. I was already reading the paperback U.N.C.L.E. novels, so I was glad to get more reading material based on the show. In small-town Texas in those pre-Internet days, I had no idea what was coming out and didn't know what to expect until I saw it.

"The Howling Teenagers Affair" was actually a novella, probably about 25,000 words, and the author behind the house-name Robert Hart Davis was really Dennis Lynds, although I had no idea of that at the time. (And I certainly didn't dream that about 15 years later, I would be trading letters with the guy who wrote "The Howling Teenagers Affair".) Lynds was a busy guy in the Sixties, writing all the Mike Shayne stories in MSMM from 1963 to 1970, or thereabouts, writing the new series of Shadow paperbacks published by Belmont Books, and turning out seven of these U.N.C.L.E. novellas for the digest magazine, in addition to mystery novels and short stories under his own name and several other pseudonyms. I was a regular reader of his work, I just never knew it at the time.

The other two main writers on the U.N.C.L.E. digest were Harry Whittington and John Jakes, with stories contributed here and there by Bill Pronzini, Talmage Powell, Frank Belknap Long, Richard Curtis, and I.G. Edmonds. Each issue featured an assortment of mystery and espionage novelettes and short stories to go with the lead "novel". Tom Ramirez, who wrote Nightstand Books as Tony Calvano, had an espionage series, and Dan Ross, probably best remembered for writing the Dark Shadows paperbacks and hosts of other Gothics as Marilyn Ross, contributed a series about a Chinese detective.

I bought nearly every issue of the magazine at Lester's, and when I got home I generally had time to sit down and read the U.N.C.L.E. novella straight through before supper. I'd read the back-up stories later. Many years later when I was writing the Mike Shayne stories in MSMM, I did one that was a tribute to those U.N.C.L.E. stories and called it "The Death From the Sky Affair". The manuscript carried a dedication to Robert Hart Davis, the house-name on those earlier stories. (And as a side note, Leo Margulies came up with that name as a tribute to Robert Davis, an early pulp editor Margulies had known.) Chuck Fritch, the editor at MSMM, didn't run the dedication with that Shayne story, and he changed the title to the simpler "Death From the Sky". But I knew what it really was, and now so do you.

UPDATE: My memory has betrayed me. It was actually my Mike Shayne story "Doomsday Island" that was the U.N.C.L.E. homage. "Death From the Sky" was an earlier story in the same series featuring Shayne's battles against The Black Lotus.