The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,8
writer away from work; plus he was spending not nearly enough time with his son Robert (who lived with first wife Charlotte). Returning to Philadelphia and then building the cabin in Maine had made seeing Bobby more practical; the boy had been summering with his father and stepmother these past several years.
The cabin provided a kind of knotty-pine womb for Gibson’s ideas to grow within. He would sit at a large pinewood desk in a corner of the central room with its vaulted ceilings, chain-smoking (cigarettes his chief stress reliever) and dreaming up yarns. No phone was allowed (calls came in to the cabin next door, where his cousin Eaton lived) with the silence punctuated only by the calls of loons and other birds out on the lake.
Not that silence was required for him to create: he’d written one Shadow novel while the carpenters built his office around him. He’d written much of another at a party in New York, with other guests reading the yarn over his shoulder—the experience had only exhilarated him.
Trips to New York were commonplace to Gibson, who enjoyed delivering plot synopses in person to editor John Nanovic, who’d become a good friend. Nanovic made useful suggestions, and Gibson felt the editor had come to know the Shadow as well as his creator.
Unlike a lot of editors, Nanovic did not stint on the compliments. He frequently told Gibson (in varying words), “You’ve got the newspaperman’s knack for giving me just enough facts to take me into the next paragraph...and the magician’s flare to intrigue me with hints of what’s to come.”
Later this afternoon, he would meet with Nanovic. Right now (it was just after one-thirty) he had his first stop to make—at the Columbia Broadcasting Building at Madison Avenue and 45th Street. The Shadow had been born in this building, and yet the father of the character had never visited the birthsite before.
Technically, of course, Gibson was the character’s stepfather. In 1930 a radio show had been introduced at CBS, Detective Story, that based its episodes on stories from the Street and Smith pulp magazine of the same name; a sinister-voiced narrator—dubbed the Shadow—presented the tales. A voice actor named Frank Readick gave the narrator a haunting laugh and a spooky presence that had made something of a national sensation.
Instead of serving to promote Detective Story Magazine as intended, however, the show inspired listeners to request at their newsstands “that Shadow detective magazine.”
Which was where Walter Gibson came in. Frank Blackwell, then the Street and Smith editor, challenged Gibson to come up with a character to go with the memorable name and the spooky voice.
Already Gibson had been toying with the idea of doing a mystery-story hero who was himself mysterious, and a little nasty, unlike the straightforward goody-two-shoes heroes of other mystery series—an avenger who would wear not a white hat, but a black one. He reflected upon his magician friends and came up with a character who combined the hypnotic power of Thurston and Blackstone with Houdini’s penchant for escapes. By early 1931, “Maxwell Grant” had begun his punishing, profitable run, charting the adventures of this tall, black-cloaked figure with the broad-brim black felt hat tucked over a hawkish countenance.
And by 1937, the radio show had dropped its narrator-version of the Shadow to adapt Gibson’s avenging hero—embodied by a new young actor with a magical second-baritone: Orson Welles.
Though Gibson had helped develop the radio version of the Shadow with scriptwriter Edward Hale Bierstadt (it had been gratifying to hear Ed say how much he loved Gibson’s yarns), the creator of the character was contractually tied up with Street and Smith to produce those twenty-four novels a year. So the radio Shadow had gone its own way, deviating somewhat from Gibson’s vision—rather over emphasizing the character’s rich-man-about-town secret identity, Lamont Cranston (admittedly a perfect fit for Welles)—but staying mostly on course...and becoming a household word among radio listeners.
Which meant—everybody in America.
The Columbia Broadcasting Building was no longer home to the Shadow show—it was a Mutual program now, and broadcast out of New York’s powerhouse WOR—but the skyscraper remained home to Orson Welles, whose amazingly resonant voice and ironic delivery had much to do with the radio Shadow’s success.
Welles had just finished his two-season run as the Shadow to take on a more ambitious project—The Mercury Theatre on the Air, an extension of the wunderkind’s acclaimed Broadway theater company—and so Gibson had been surprised to be contacted by the showman himself, to discuss a Shadow project.