Pulp magazines have influenced writers, artists, film directors, software developers, and countless others over the years. Our “Pulp History” articles focus on the rough-paper writers, editors, publishers, and artists who have inspired and continue to inspire the creators of the world’s popular culture.
Born 125 years ago on September 12, 1897, Walter B. Gibson published his first article at the age of eighteen. By the time he graduated from Colgate University in 1920, he had been published more than 200 times.
By 1931, Gibson had been writing professionally for over ten years, supplying daily features to Philadelphia’s Ledger Syndicate and other publishers. He had written Houdini’s Escapes for Harcourt, Brace, and Company, and was a regular contributor to Macfadden’s True Strange Stories. He was also a ghostwriter for magicians Harry Blackstone, Harry Houdini, and Howard Thurston, penning articles and books under their names.
According to Gibson’s introduction to The Crime Oracle and The Teeth of the Dragon: Two Adventures of The Shadow:
Sheer chance was forging a chain of irrevocable circumstance that afternoon early in 1931 when I stopped at the editorial offices of Street & Smith, the one place where I had no good reason to be that day or for some time to come.
The character known as The Shadow had been introduced to the public on July 31, 1930, serving as the mysterious narrator for The Detective Story Hour, a CBS radio program sponsored by the Street & Smith pulp chain that dramatized stories from the publisher’s Detective Story Magazine. According to popular culture scholar, Martin Grams:
To give the program a splash of color, a horror host was added, a menacing voice of conscience that sometimes urged the criminal to continue their deeds but suggesting that retribution was close at hand. The Shadow became that voice. To add publicity for the radio program, a number of press releases were issued and sent out to various columnists and newspapers across the East Coast. These press releases were designed to add an air of mystery behind the man with the voice.
When it became apparent to the company that customers were not asking their newsdealers for Detective Story Magazine, but “that Shadow magazine,” Street & Smith decided to give readers what they wanted — a single character magazine.
With the world in the throes of The Great Depression, Street & Smith was battling for market share. Movies had started talking in 1927 and soon, people were packing the growing number of movie palaces and the radio was becoming the focus of the family living room. Publishers new and old were offering pulps featuring dare-devil flyers, hardboiled dicks, gangsters and their molls, and the wonders of science and the imagination.
On the day that he visited Street & Smith, Gibson had just landed a pair of book contracts. One was to be a sequel to his Houdini book, while the other was Blackstone’s Modern Card Tricks. Again Gibson:
Those two contracts for new books were like stepping stones to my big ambition, which was to crack the mystery field with a hard-cover, full-fledged novel. For that, I needed an outstanding character and I had been thinking of one who would be a mystery in himself, moving into the affairs of lesser folk much to their amazement. By combining Houdini’s penchant for escapes with the hypnotic power of Tibetan mystics, plus the knowledge shared by Thurston and Blackstone in the creation of illusions, such a character would have unlimited scope when confronted by surprise situations, yet all could be brought within the range of credibility.
Whether or not this was all happenstance or a “fictionized fact article,” he stopped by Street & Smith to discuss “a series of shorts on factual crimes” that had interested Frank Blackwell, Street & Smith editor-in-chief.
. . . when I mentioned the proposed factual articles, Blackwell dismissed the subject completely. He had something quite different to discuss and came right to the point. Street & Smith were testing new magazines to meet increasing competition and they had decided to revive the “character” field. It would be a flashback to the days of Frank Merriwell and the original Nick Carter, or even Buffalo Bill, but with a modern slant. Specifically, they wanted a character to be called “The Shadow,” as a tie-in with an announcer’s voice that was being used to introduce The Detective Story Hour, a weekly radio program that dramatized a short story from each new issue of Detective Story Magazine.
. . . that intrigued me, for it fitted with the very type of character that I already had in mind. When Blackwell asked if I had any ideas, I went right into a verbal description . . . It was . . . enough for Blackwell. He told me to use my character as The Shadow and pick it up from there, putting The Shadow and his agents on the track of a mystery involving murder and robbery with whatever cross-purpose or false trails I needed. I was to come back with a few opening chapters and a general outline within a week.
True story or sleight-of-hand, Gibson got the job. But after the first two issues of The Shadow: A Detective Magazine had flown off the stands, Gibson signed on to produce one story a month. About a year later, he was asked to double his output as The Shadow Magazine was to appear twice each month. It continued on this schedule through the February 15, 1943 number.
Over the course of eighteen years and 325 adventures — with Walter Gibson writing 283 of them — The Shadow inspired a whole new generation of pulp heroes, and, later, scores of comic book superheroes. Gibson and his occasional fill-in, Theodore Tinsley, also introduced the concept of super-crooks and super-crime.
We hope you’ll join us from August 3 – 6 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh – Cranberry in Mars, Pennsylvania for PulpFest 2023 and a salute to some of the Great Pulp Heroes inspired by the long shadow of Walter B. Gibson.
In the meantime, please subscribe to our new YouTube channel where you’ll find our first segment of 90 Years of the Great Pulp Heroes — #1 — The Shadow. Click here to subscribe.
Our featured image is George Rozen’s iconic portrait of The Shadow, originally painted for the August 1, 1933 issue of The Shadow Magazine.
Modest Stein will always be known as the Love Story artist. After all, he contributed hundreds of covers to the Street & Smith magazine. Stein also contributed the cover art for the magazine’s first issue, dated April 1931 and entitled The Shadow: A Detective Magazine. Not knowing how well their new pulp would sell, Street & Smith opted to reuse Stein’s cover illustration for H. Bedford-Jones’ “Mr. Shen of Shensi,” originally published in the October 1, 1919, issue of The Thrill Book. Modest Stein would later create over forty covers for The Shadow during the 1940s.
John Coughlin contributed the front cover art for the April 18, 1931 number of Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine. This issue followed the end of the “$1000 Shadow Contest,” described in our post, “Selling the Shadow.”
After the first two issues of The Shadow: A Detective Magazine had sold out, it became obvious that Street & Smith had a hit on its hands. The magazine became a monthly with its third issue, with Jerome Rozen as the cover artist. After three additional Jerome Rozen covers, his twin brother George took over the cover duties for the popular magazine. George Rozen would paint nearly two hundred covers for the pulp — including the magazine’s final issue, dated Summer 1949. His art would also grace the covers of the 1942 and 1943 issues of The Shadow Annual and the first six issues of Street & Smith’s Shadow Comics.
