Welcome to the world--of Dr. Shadows .
I created this nemesis of crime back in the 1990s in response to my love of the pulp heroes of old. He first saw print in Thom Johnson's Classic Pulp Fiction Stories and then on VirtualTales.com's website in 2006/7 in serialized form. A separate series of short stories has appeared in the wonderful webmagazine Blazing!Adventures.com and in the print anthology of that same name due out in '08. The E-book from VirtualTales followed and more stories are on the boards for this enemy of evil, Galahad in Grey who is the final hope of the hopeless. So here is a little tour of the world of the Granite Man:
A world, of the pulp adventure! It's a world that has faded into the mists of time; devoured by and then reborn into its own offspring, the paperback novel.
So named because of the cheap wood pulp it was produced on, the pulp magazines reigned supreme from the 1920s, well in to the late 1940s with their sensationally garish colored covers and daring purpled prose within.
The 'Bloody' pulps ran the gambit from Range Romances , to Battle Aces , Gangster Molls and Fantastic Planetary Stories ; but it was in the areas of detective and heroic fiction--that they soared the highest.
Black Mask , the high watermark in gumshoes, gave us Phillip Marlow , Same Spade , the Continental Op , Race Williams , Oscar Sail and countless variations of the first, & truly, American deductive champions.
The Hard-boiled Private Eye .
No Effete Raffles or Peter Wimsey , these guys (and Gals) were the hard workin' blue collar heroes, tryin' to make a buck and do the right thing. Cowboys in a concrete world. They road an urban range and routed bank robbers, securities rustlers and Wall Street murderers with an old fashioned code of justice that owed as much to Ivanhoe as Bill Cody.
They may have been 'Hardboiled' but they were by no means hard hearted, anything but; always a sucker for a sob story or a 'dame in distress.' They would face impossible odds time and again to do the right thing.
Meanwhile (as they say), back on the magazine racks, a phenomenon occurred: the Hero Pulp was started by Street and Smith publications; a company with a long history in periodicals (including dime novel hero Nick Carter.) The company decided to embrace the new medium, radio, with the Street & Smith hour , where a narrator would read stories from their detective magazines as an extended commercial for the book. As a gimmick, they named the narrator 'The Shadow' , with no thought to any other effect than to make the stories a bit spookier. No biggie, or so they thought.
Soon however, letters poured into the publisher wanting to know more about this mysterious host. The publisher, W. A. Ralston and Editor John Nanovic, quickly decided to rush a magazine titled, "The Shadow" into production to protect a potentially lucrative property.
They had no idea who or what the Shadow was, but they knew just the right guy to write it; a magician/journalist cum pulp writer named Walter Gibson .
It was the perfect marriage of man and material: Gibson (under the house name of Maxwell Grant), created a fascinatingly dark & mysterious crusader who, with his army of aides and agents, fought a constant war against the forces of gangdom.
The magazine was an instant hit selling out month after month so consistently that Street & Smith began to print issues every other week and Gibson, in heroic pulp writer tradition--kept pace churning out, eventually, over two hundred and fifty Shadow novels at the astounding pace of one every three to four days!
Other publishers jumped on the band wagon with lesser 'dark avengers' over the next few years: George Chance-the Green Ghost , The Green Lama (of the Tibetan variety), The Black Bat , The Red Mask , Street & Smith's own The Whisperer , and the most successful and colorful of all The Spider .
None equaled the heights the Shadow achieved in the issuing Decade of the hero pulp!
Street & Smith tried to catch lightening in a bottle a second time in 1933 with a counterpoint to their dark Avenger in a bronze crusader named Doc Savage .
No lurker in the shadows this time, the good Doctor was a science based good guy who did his combat with evil in the naked light of public exposure.
Once again, the perfect man was hired to guide this champion's fortunes under the house name of 'Kenneth Robeson': Lester Dent .
Dent was an ex-telegrapher and inventor, a world traveler and very much like his literary child.
Many lesser Titans followed in Doc's wake-- Capt. Hazzard , The Avenger , Thunder Jim Wade , Captain John Fury, The Skipper etc. but none held a candle to the metallic man's success.
Just as the dime novel was eclipsed by the pulp, so also did the magazines evolve into digests and the paperbacks.
Many pulp characters appeared directly, or strongly influenced, their comic book off-springs as well. Most notably the Man of Steel Superman owes much to the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage.
A few of the pulps limped along as digests and a vast number of pulp stories, novel length and the short stories, were reprinted into paperback form. Thus, an era was disappearing.
This is where I come into the story directly. In 1964 Bantam Books began to reprint the Doc Savage books with dynamite James Bama covers (the pulp had ceased publication in 1949) aiming, & rightly so, at the growing science fiction market. To say it was a phenomenal success would be an understatement. It caused a resurrection of many of its pulp brethren and inspired scores of imitators and pastiches.
Doc was my first conscious contact with the pulp world. I soon discovered the very active pulp fan community, among which Tom and Ginger Johnson's 'Echoes' stands out even today; along with Paul McCall's Aces , and Howard Wright's Bronze Gazette , were my portals to the past.
Some say the pulp era was a more innocent time, but I think it was just a time with different priorities and ethics. Values that to this day I find alluring and inspiring.
I made up my mind then to visit that time through characters that lived there. Not someone else's characters (there is a whole school of writing which ascribes to writing new stories of old characters which is well and good when continuing the official continuity such as Will Murray has done with his exceptional Doc Savage stories--but otherwise, I feel it is a little sacrilegious and somewhat like poaching).
I felt an original pulp hero was needed, but not one who was a ghost of someone else, no pastiche of Bronze or a Shadow's shadow. I sought to create a character that could have graced the newsstand in the golden decade of the '30s and would have fit in as 'just one of the guys.' That meant I had to copy not just the language ('You're a Pippin, Kiddo", "Why you gazzo," "Drop the Roscoe!" etc.) but some of the attitudes and worldviews those characters had. I was, after all, not trying to do a look back from a distance with a wink or righteous 'retooling' of history, but rather a trip backward in an attempt to 'blend.'
I searched for a bit to find the elements of the pulp greats that appealed to me the strongest: Doc Savage's self discipline, logical mind, secret gold horde (Mayan) and companions, the Avenger's ashen skin, his distinctly none racist world view(he has an African American couple as assistants and treats them as valued team members) and personal stake in fighting crime (his wife and child were killed by gangsters in the incident that cause his unusual physical condition), the Shadow's mysterious eastern connections and hidden gold horde ( Aztec), the Green Lama's gentle humor and spirituality( he was the only bona-fide Buddhist Lama in all of pulp action, the Green Ghost's use of stage magic and illusion to foil the badguys and put it all into a pot to stew.
What bubbled to the surface was Anton Chadeaux PhD who, the world would come to know--as Dr. Shadows! He was., a petro-chemical engineer wiho dabbled in stage magic during college where he was something of a heck raiser and a wastrel. He undergoes a life transforming disaster in the mountains of Northern Korea when Chinese warlords in Japanese employ shoot down the plane on which he and his parents are traveling.
All are killed save the young Chadeaux.
He is left for dead, hopelessly paralyzed. Fate intervenes when he is found by monks from an ancient, hidden monastery. The monks of Wei practice Sulsa Do, a 2,000-year-old art that perfects the body and frees the mind.
They take the paralyzed American to the monastery and bath him in herbal solutions that heal his wounds. For almost three years while he lays in the balm he mind is trained daily in the ancient disciplines and for two years after he can walk again he builds his body into a modern Hercules.
The herbal baths leave the American Lazarus with ashen skin and silver grey hair and with his chiseled new physique he truly looks a man carved from granite.(yes, he is referred to by the press as The Granite Man).
The warlords, prompted by rumors of hidden treasure, attack and destroy the monastery. The dying abbot compels Chadeaux to hide and reveals to him the secret store of wealth, extracting from the transformed man an oath to use it to aid mankind.
When he returns to the west he establishes the Shadows Foundation for Justice. He gathers around him a loyal band of crusaders and so is born the legend of Dr. Shadows, a grey Galahad, nemesis of evil and last hope of the hopeless.
With the stories I try to deal with some of prejudices of the time in an enlightened, but not a finger pointing way. The best heroes of the period, after all, like Doc, The Shadow and others did not practice the virulent racism of the more sensational pulps or movies, albeit the
'Yellow Peril' attitude was everywhere. In the case of the Grey wolf of Justice he has no problem with Korean, Chinese or even Japanese people, but he does have a BIG Problem with the Japanese government (as did many Americans and Chinese after the horrors of Machuria) so the Japanese are often (so far actually always) the villains.
Exploring this pulp 'universe (which is shared with those greats--I make constant references to them without 'infringing' or meeting them, caused me to think about that darker world of the 'shadowed' avengers the Shadow/Spider/Phantom style hero and created the Skullmask, a generational dark hero with a high body count in all the stories. Several of the different Skullmasks encounter Dr. Shadows in different points in his long career and I look forward to writing those stories...
No winks to contemporary attitudes or camp humor, just straight up pulp!
Keep in mind as you read them that while I may have softened some of the more extreme views that some characters held, villain and hero alike, I have not written a PC peon, or pastiche of a 1930's story.
I have done my best to write the time as it was; so don't be ruffled by a derisive sneer or dismissive attitude; in the end, goodness and toleration win out.
After all--it was simpler time, right?
-- T.J. Glenn, author/creator, ' Dr. Shadows'
- 2007
Copyright 2007 By Teel James Glenn