Walter B. Gibson

• Born: September 12, 1897
• Birthplace: Germantown, Pennsylvania
• Died: December 6, 1985
• Place of death: Kingston, New York

Type of Plot: Master sleuth

Principal Series: The Shadow, 1931-1963; Norgil, 1937-1940

Contribution

Walter B. Gibson brought to the mystery novel a consistent sense of illusion. Misdirection is combined in a spiritual and symbolic way as well as in specific terms. Nothing is what it appears to be on the surface, and anyone can be revealed at the end as the guilty party. The greatest mystery of all, however, concerns the identity and origins of the detective himself. The mysterious cloaked avenger known as the Shadow has a dispassionate approach to crime fighting, which to him is much like an intellectual puzzle or a game of chess. Gibson works toward achieving an effect as he manipulates his audience. Each novel in the series is not merely another unit in a saga, interchangeable with its mates, but part of an evolving account of the career of the hero. The Shadow has become a symbol of what “mystery” itself should be and of that part of the story that is most fascinating because it is never solved. Even the revelations in the story “The Shadow Unmasks” did not spoil the ending.

Biography

Walter Brown Gibson was born on September 12, 1897, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the son of Alfred Cornelius Gibson and May Whidden Gibson. His father was a manufacturer of gas fixtures. The name Maxwell Grant, under which Gibson created the Shadow writings, was derived from the names of two magic dealers whom he knew. Attracted to magic from childhood, Gibson published stories and puzzles at an early age. Former President William Howard Taft praised a story for which Gibson won a literary prize, predicting that he would have a long literary career.

On being graduated from Colgate University in 1920, Gibson went to work for a Philadelphia newspaper. As a reporter, he learned to write quickly and succinctly. At the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, he created the first of many features for their syndicate, “After Dinner Tricks.” Collaborating with noted stage magicians, Gibson produced books under their names, linking his name with those of Harry Houdini, Howard Thurston, and Harry Blackstone. His journalism and editorial experience (for Macfadden magazines) attracted publishers Street and Smith, who needed someone to write a new magazine, The Shadow, which they were planning. Eventually, Gibson would supply twenty-four novelettes each year.

Between 1931 and 1949, Gibson wrote 283 novelettes about the Shadow, one series about magician-detective Norgil, scripts for Super-Magician Comics and Shadow Comics, and several standard magic texts. After six years, a substitute writer was hired to supply additional Shadow material, but Gibson was the major contributor. When the magazine ceased publication, Gibson continued his career with articles for the true-crime magazines, a series of self-help books, new magic books, revisions of some of his earlier titles, comic books and newspaper strips, juvenile titles, and two novels about magician-detectives. On August 27, 1949, he married Pearl Litzka Raymond. Not the first marriage for either of them, it proved a lasting and significant collaboration. A professional magician, Litzka Gibson brought a stability and support to the somewhat nomadic life of her new husband. The majority of his books were published after their marriage. In his later years, Gibson lectured on magic and the Shadow, accepted two awards from the Academy of Magical Arts, and kept in contact with friends around the country. He died on December 6, 1985, in Kingston, New York.

Analysis

Although Walter B. Gibson’s the Shadow is a very unusual character, he is not a creature invented out of thin air and smoke but a combination of existing traditions within the mystery genre. The exotic atmosphere of Sax Rohmer, the avenging band of men created by Edgar Wallace, the gangsters from the early Black Mask school, newspaper headlines, and the hero with multiple identities (Fantomas, Frank L. Packard’s Jimmie Dale, Johnston McCulley’s Zorro) were all available for Gibson to draw on, even subconsciously. He once referred to the Shadow as a “benevolent Dracula.” It was the idea of a shadowy avenger that was given substance by this consummate storyteller.

The Shadow series is not so much a series of unrelated mysteries with a recurring detective as it is a sequence of stories, none of which can stand completely alone without drawing the reader to its fellows, each of which contributes to an evolving story. The subject of that story is the detective, about whom there is as much mystery as can be unraveled in the plot. If the average detective story can be criticized for not having a solution as imaginative and spellbinding as the mystery itself, then the Shadow series avoids much of that criticism. It has been said of Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) that it is the “perfect” detective story, for, having been left unfinished, it presents no solution to spoil the mystery for the reader. With each novel in the Shadow series, the reader learns more about the mysterious avenger but not everything. New facets of the Shadow’s personality are discovered without exhausting the possibilities for discovering more the next time. Even in the famous pulp magazine novelette “The Shadow Unmasks,” where much is revealed, not all the questions are answered: The Shadow remains largely masked.

Despite his use of force and action, symbolized by his two .45 automatics, and his reputation as the first bringer of death in the pulp detective magazines, the Shadow is as analytical as any detective of the Golden Age, studying clues and weighing evidence before naming the guilty party. He is a law unto himself, sentencing as well as accusing, a characteristic he shares with Jimmie Dale and Wallace’s Just Men; some may question his need for agents in his war on crime. In reality, the Shadow cannot be everywhere, although that is the illusion he wishes to create. Through his agents, Harry Vincent, Rutledge Mann, Burbank, Hawkeye, Moe Shrevnitz, Myra Reldon, Margo Lane, and others, he can appear to be omnipresent. They serve not only as his eyes and ears but also as “proxy-heroes” (Gibson’s phrase), to whom the events of the plot happen, thus allowing the Shadow to remain offstage and even more mysterious.

What gives the stories their unique style and flavor is the continued use of motifs and references that have their basis in the lore of the stage magician. Most successful writers of detective novels tend to fill their works with information about fields that they find fascinating but seldom has there been a series that paid such loving attention to the skill of the illusionist. The Shadow possesses a bag of tricks to rival that of the Wizard of Oz. His escapes rival those of Houdini, he is a master of the trick powders that explode at the fingertips, and he can appear or vanish in smoke and flame.

The Shadow assumes several identities that allow him to mix with suspects, different classes in society, and the police. His most ubiquitous identity is that of a wealthy globe-trotter named Lamont Cranston. (Gibson chose the name with care to suggest someone with society connections and named him for the financier Thomas Lamont and a Scottish theater owner, Baillie Cranston.) There is indeed a real Lamont Cranston, however, whose identity the Shadow merely assumes when appropriate. In “The Shadow Unmasks,” the master of darkness is revealed to have a basic identity of his own beneath the assumed one of Cranston. This basic identity is a famous explorer and aviator named Kent Allard. In each instance, the other identity is someone the public recognizes so well that it is not identified with the persona of the Shadow.

The proxy-hero is not always someone close to the Shadow. Sometimes he (or she) is the unwilling victim of the criminal’s schemes (like Paul Brent in “The Golden Master” or Marjorie Cragg in “Shiwan Khan Returns”) with whom the reader is asked to identify. Gibson’s plots resemble those found in classic Golden Age detective novels, with liberal additions of action and adventure. At their base is a solid mystery that is introduced in the first chapter: Who is the mysterious figure threatening the life of the heroine? What has happened to the famous jewels? Who is killing the wealthy businessmen in town? Why can the hero not remember what happened to him last week? The mystery is fairly clued and the solution fairly revealed. Often the villain and his gang are professional criminals, with the master villain equal in ability to the master of darkness.

Gibson uses all the skill of the professional illusionist to keep the reader wondering about the identity of the villain and his motive. Some of the mystification involves the Shadow’s ability to blend into the shadows in his black cloak and slouch hat, seeming to be invisible. In other versions of the Shadow stories (radio or comic books), that is accomplished through hypnosis alone. In Gibson’s stories, it is accomplished by the black art illusion that takes advantage of the fact that a dark object cannot be seen against a black background. The Shadow’s true identity is known to no one in the series, not even his agents. The police suspect him of being a criminal at best or a myth at worst until Inspector Cardona comes to realize that there really is a mysterious avenger known as the Shadow. It takes much longer for Commissioner Weston to come to that conclusion.

The stories are set all over the globe but primarily in New York City and the New Jersey countryside. A downtown club, the Cobalt Club, serves as a place where Lamont Cranston can hold conversations with the police commissioner, while a waterfront bar known as the Black Ship is the appropriate meeting place for gangland citizens. A few settings made familiar to the reader assist in keeping the stories credible by providing solid points of reference. Gibson explained his theories for detective fiction in several interviews toward the end of his life, but his earliest declaration in print was in an article in Writer’s Digest in 1941. The Shadow, he explained, was in the crime-fighting game for his own amusement and thus the reader’s entertainment. He enjoyed solving the problems of other characters and sorting out the major mystery that involved the main, or proxy, hero.

The Living Shadow

All the mystery-story elements peculiar to the Shadow series did not, however, arrive fully grown to Gibson at once. More than any other detective series, the Shadow stories evolved into their familiar pattern. Much of that pattern can be seen developing in the first three novelettes of the series, The Living Shadow (1931), The Eyes of the Shadow (1931), and The Shadow Laughs! (1931). The first is the story of Harry Vincent as he undertakes his first assignment for the Shadow. Until he met the Shadow, who saved him from a suicide attempt, his life seemed to have no purpose. Harry’s story is that of all the Shadow’s agents: They owe everything to the Shadow and never forget it. What will the Shadow do with an agent’s life? The answer is that he will improve it, risk it, or perhaps lose it. In exchange for restoring Harry Vincent to life, the Shadow demands absolute obedience.

Harry does not solve the mystery of the Shadow, but he does succeed in discovering who killed Gregory Laidlow. There is a second plot concerning stolen jewels and criminal doings in Chinatown, a favorite setting in the series. Alternating between plots, both major and secondary, was a Gibson trademark.

The Eyes of the Shadow and The Shadow Laughs!

Not until the second novelette, The Eyes of the Shadow, does the reader meet Lamont Cranston and suspect that he and the Shadow share identities. When both are wounded, Cranston takes to his bed and the Shadow disappears, leaving the field to his agents. Having established Cranston as the Shadow’s alter ego, Gibson pulled quite a different rabbit from his hat in the third novelette, The Shadow Laughs! Claude Fellows, one of the Shadow’s own agents, thinks he has discovered that his master and Cranston are one and the same. He then has a conversation with Cranston in which the traveler claims to have been out of the country at the time of the events of The Eyes of the Shadow. Fellows’s confusion is nothing compared with that of Cranston himself when he discovers his identical twin facing him. The reader learns that the Shadow is a distinct entity with an identity that remains unrevealed. Gibson was able to retain the essential secret of his mystery man for six years until revealing it in “The Shadow Unmasks.” Wisely, he kept some of his cards up his sleeve, for the events in that story do not explain all the secrets.

Norgil Series

In the late 1930’s, Gibson wrote twenty-three short stories about his magician-detective, Norgil. Where the Shadow was a blending of mystery with magical additives, the Norgil stories place the emphasis on the magician’s profession. Intended by their author to reflect the public lives of many of the great magicians of the golden age of magic, the episodes in Norgil’s career take him into a position of solving “impossible crimes.” Suave and mustached, Norgil is neither as flamboyantly exotic as the Shadow nor as fully developed as a character. The individual stories are like the events pictured on a circus poster, each designed to draw the crowd into the tent. Not as well known as the Shadow stories, the Norgil series is the unfinished sonata in Gibson’s repertoire. Norgil emulates most of the great magicians of the golden age but was not allowed time to complete the cycle. (He never takes his show overseas like Houdini or Raymond.) The reader learns that Loring (Norgil’s real last name) is an anagram for Norgil, but in an unwritten twenty-fourth story, readers were to have been told that his full name was W. Bates Loring, which is an anagram for Walter B. Gibson. The author was a puzzlemaker to the end.

Gibson created a series of mystery novels that epitomized the very meaning of mystery and a character, the Shadow, who is better remembered than any of the individual adventures in which he appeared. The Shadow shares a rung on the ladder of popular culture with figures such as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes.

Principal Series Characters:

• The Shadow is a mysterious figure in black, a master of illusion, whose keen mind is able to fathom the most deeply hidden secrets. A law unto himself, he heads an organization dedicated to fighting crime. His real identity is Kent Allard, flier-adventurer, but he most often appears as socialite Lamont Cranston.
• Norgil , whose real name is Loring, is a professional stage magician with a penchant for solving mysteries. Borrowing the public persona of the great figures of prestidigitation of the day, he uses his knowledge of their trade—misdirection and illusion—to find answers to problems he encounters during his performances.

Bibliography

Cox, J. Randolph. Man of Magic and Mystery: A Guide to the Work of Walter B. Gibson. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988. Complete and comprehensively annotated bibliography of Gibson’s writings.

Goulart, Ron. “A.K.A. The Shadow.” In Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972. Discusses the importance of the Shadow to the success and evolution of pulp fiction.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Looks at Gibson’s contribution to the pulps and the relationship of pulp fiction to its more respectable literary cousins.

Hutchison, Don. The Great Pulp Heroes. Buffalo, N.Y.: Mosaic Press, 1996. The Shadow is compared with his equally famous codenizens of the pulps, including Doc Savage, Tarzan, and Zorro.

Montgomery, George. The Shadow Knew. Clarence Center, N.Y.: Textile Bridge Press, 1989. Short pamphlet covering the biography and career of Walter B. Gibson and discussing his influence on Jack Kerouac.

Shimeld, Thomas J. Walter B. Gibson and the Shadow. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. Detailed scholarly study of the Shadow in pulps, drama, and radio. Bibliographic references and index.