The Shadow: Jade Dragon & House of Ghosts

by Walter B. Gibson

The Shadow in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Genres: Mystery, Pulp

205 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Walter Brown Gibson (September 12, 1897-December 6, 1985) was an American author and professional magician best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow. Gibson, under the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote "more than 300 novel-length" Shadow stories, writing up to "10,000 words a day" to satisfy public demand during the character's golden age in the 1930s and 1940s.

Reviews

[Chris Youngblood · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pulpier than a gallon of Minutemaid OJ filtered through a ground up tree. But that's what I expected, so that's what I got. Not horrible, not great, but probably not something I'd go looking for very often. Some of the language was overblown and stilted, and the character of the Shadow was, by today's standards, absolutely ridiculous, and I often wondered just how Lamont Cranston managed to accomplish anything without everyone automatically spotting him as The Shadow - absolutely no attempt at subtlety, subterfuge, or any kind of ability to hide a secret identity.

But then, I live in an age of The Gritty Reboot, where fantastic things and ridiculous supherheroes are mashed sideways into the frame of 'reality', given superheroic yet still just-barely realistic abilities, gadgets, and plots, and filmed in shadow before being projected onto a screen with all the gamma settings set to zero. The silly, pulp-laden antics of The Shadow wouldn't survive today's grittier-than-a-mile-of-desert-road heroes and superheroes, though I have no doubt that somewhere, some desperate movie executive is trying to finagle the Gritty Reboot version of The Shadow in an attempt at making a quick buck (especially considering that just about everyone has forgotten the ill-fated Alec Baldwin vehicle of the '90s).

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

library copy of Doubleday Crime Club edition.