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Show Ti Nigh I Mi i st or Popular radio hero, The Shadow, was unlike book character by Clifford Terry Chicago Tribune Writer His face was entirely obscured by a d felt hat bent downward over his features. His long, black coat looked almost like part of the thickening fog. He was a tall, Cyrano-beake- d figure who might have represented death itself, the embodiment of those high abstracts that are our final defense against the barbarians. broad-brimme- HIS LAUGH WAS chilling, eerie, breaking like a crashing wave over those who heard it. His mastery of disguises was uncanny. He traveled Moscow, Paris, Havana, widely and spoke the native Atlantic City language impeccably A kind of primitive James Bond, he boasted an arsenal that included exploding powders sewn into the hem of his cloak and a vial containing the powders of The Devils Whisper. DEDICATED TO eradicating crime, he took on first-rat- e villains. The Cobra, who wore a snake costume and hissed. Shiwan Khan, a Fu Manchu-typ- e descendant of and Genghis. Dr. Rodil Mocquino, the Voodoo Master. Lingo Queed, the linguistic genius. The Wasp, not a High Church Episcopalian, but a fiend who came equipped with a buzzing voice and stinging wings. HE WAS the Shadow, popular hero of pulp magazines and a radio program in the 1930s and 40s and now subject of a new book, The Night Master, written by Robert Sampson of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, of all things, and published by a press in Oak Forest, HI., of all places. Most persons who remember him, of course, know the Shadow from the radio show, which started in the early 30s and lasted until 1954. The Shadow, in reality Lamont Cranston, wealthy who, years ago young in the Orient, learned the hypnotic power to cloud mens minds so that they could not see him, was played by, among others, Orson Welles and Bret Morrison. The lovely Margot Lane, his constant friend and aide and the only one to know his true identity, was played at one point by Agnes man-about-to- Mor-rehea- d. MAKE NO MISTAKE The Night Master is not about what Robert Sampson calls the infamous radio program. It didnt have anything to do with the Shadow, he said recently over the phone from Huntsville, Ala., where he is a program analyst chase papers a lot) for NASA. As a young man, I got to the magazines first, and that spoiled me entirely. What I heard on the radio was nothing. (I Part of what he heard was that the Shadows identity was that of Cranston. Not true, according to Sampsons book. In the novels and in the pulps, it was revealed that the Shadow only assumed the identity of the globetrotting playboy so he could gain entry into the inner circles of power. Actually, he was Kent Allard, a famous World War I ace known as the Dark Eagle, a roving secret agent who after the war decided to fight boredom by fighting crime. , MOREOVER, THE Margot Lane of his doctorate in mathematics, to devote e to a mail-ordbook business, mostly science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, westerns. the magazines was a bit of a wimp. Girl nuisance, Sampson calls her in his book, adding that her introduction in 1941 unleashed outraged howls from the readers. (Part Girl Friday, part dizzy socialite, she has a capacity for headstrong blundering into trouble which compares favorably with an active girl. . . . The Shadow relishes teasing Margot but he shows none of the warmth in the novels that was so liberally smeared about the radio programs.) full-tim- started collecting science fiction 10 or 11, the entrepreneur said showing a visitor around his home, jammed with vintage I when I was pulp magazines ITS AN obsession, he admitted. My hobby has turned into something more. I have one of the largest pulp collections in the world and one of the larger science fiction and fantasy According to The Night Master, the Shadow represented one of the pulp n collections. Im probdbly the fan, collector and writer on pulp magazines in the country. Theres probably some hubris in that statement, but theres also the truth. best-know- specialized heroes, the justice figure, which included Zorro, the Avenging Twins and the Just Men. (Other popular pulp heroes included Sir George Trevor of a dance-ban- d Diplomatic adventurer named the Syncopating Kid, and Craig Kennedy, a college professor whose associate was a newspaperman of refined stupidity named, uh, Walter Jameson.) Free-Lance- Ray Walsh, who owns a bookstore in Mich., also is financially involved. Our business is more aimed at tjie collector than the general reader. About 73 1 got into publishing, booklets about characters in the pulp9 and reprints of some of the rare issues. They were typewritten because we couldnt afford There were Shadow movies, finger- type-settin- g. Actually, the character started off as an announcer on Detective Story Program over CBS radio in 1930. The show featured a story from the next weeks issue of Detective Story Magazine. The deep, sinister voice told his listeners: Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows, and then broke into his proclai-matiochilling laugh. The The weed of crime bears bitter fniit, also appears to have been launched at this time. PULP READERS BEGAN asking for that Shadow magazine, and in response, publishers Street & Smith decided to push the Shadow into their magazine as a character himself. A journalist named Walter B. Gibson, who had written books on magic, happened to drop into the Street & Smith offices and walked out with a commitment to write a 70,000-wornovel titled The Living Shadow. The Shadow quickly was given his own publication, which ran from 1931 to n, now-famo- To fanatics, his book may tell you more than you may care known about the Night Master, as well as the magazine itself (which, he inch in width reveals, was reduced between January, 1938, and January, 1940.) However, his style is breezily amusing. (Describing his heros antagonists, he notes: Their ambitions drink the ocean. Foresighted, ruthless, they customarily deal in mass murder, mass robbery They coat New York streets with the dead as other men salt The Night Master is our second book at Pulp Press. The first, Hades & Hocus Pocus, combined two novels by Lester Dent, who wrote the Doc Savage series. It did reasonably well, 700 or 800 copies. The Night Master is the only hardcover thats ever been published on the Shadow. A review appeared a while ago in Publishers Weekly, and since then, orders have been trickling in from collectors and 15 or 20 libraries across the country. Its also been ordered by distributors who handle these kinds of books. (The Shadow Knows, Ha, Ha For 18 years, Sampson writes, the Shadow was part of American life, familiar as Fords and the Flag. Ha). IT TOOK HIM about eight months, writing nights and weekends, to complete the work. Last year he finished another, which he plans to show to Weinberg in due time. Its about the Spider, an even more bloody character. More killings per chapter than the Shadow managed in a whole novel. His family, he added, doesnt share his enthusiasm. My wife tolerates it. My daughters look at me with pity in their eyes, clucking their tongues as if to say, Poor old fella. East Lansing, s, kits, toy pistols, print kits, make-u- p wristwatches, comic books, sheet music He had become acquainted with Weinberg when subscribing to the Chicagoans monthly publication called Pulp. After reading an essay Sampson had written for Mystery Readers News Letter, Weinberg asked him to do an article on the Shadow. The Night Master developed later, quite by accident. I was working on a much longer manuscript on the development of series characters, Sampson said, and before I knew it, the section on the Shadow had turned into a book. told, about 5,000 pulps (such as Crime Busters, South Sea Stories, The Mysterious Wu Fang) plus another 5,000 paperbacks and 2,000 hardcovers perhaps because a dame named Thelda Blanchet tried to doublecross him back in 1932. Like Sherlock Holmes, the Shadow Sampson concludes, seems bom to bachelorhood. industrys and books, stacked on shelves and packed in shopping bags which is not to mention the ones All farmed out to his mother-in-la- Whats more, the Shadow in the pulps didnt care a hoot about any women, magazine told Chicago swarms with little stores where you can find them, he said. Believe me, it aint the same down here. No one in Alabama can ever remember seeing a pulp magazine. He now has about 2,500 magazines a pitiful drop in the bucket compared to Mr. Weinberg including 320 of the 325 Shadows. er But -- potatoes.) As for the popularity of the pulps and the Shadow in particular, Sampson, The Depression was just speculates: getting into full collapse. What was needed was some sort of a figure acting within the popular mythology to strike Im also trying to hit people who arent involved in this specialized field, who just remember the Shadow and-o- r American publishing in the 30s. Obviously, it wont be a best seller, but I think there should be enough people so we could sell 2,000 or 3,000 copies. Bob Sampson writes with enough style that people can read it for entertainment. A WRY, man SOFT-SPOKE- N out against all the menaces, from gangster domination to government corruption, that everybody perceived were floating arouAd, destroying the society, ruining the economy and otherwise causing havoc. who uses phrases like good heavens, the Sampson was the son of the peripatetic railroad worker. He remembers becoming hooked on the pulps when he was 15. The magazines were being handed around Charleston y of (W. Va.) as a kind of literature. I first ran into Doc Savage, and then someone told me the Shadow was much better, which I couldnt believe until I read the thing. I bought all the new ones and began haunting the stores. For the next several years I was an avid seeker into obscure and pretty seedy places. However, after we left Charleston, that wonderful collection was given away to the war drive. d 1949. WE HAVE THE same thing going today in paperback. Starting about eight years ago, there was a whole burst of individual bloody characters: the Butcher, the Pertetrator, the Executioner. Apparently such stories are equated with a considerable amount of social unease. In those moments that his book steers dangerously toward the pedantic, Sampson bails himself out by trotting out a bit of irreverence. (How the Shadow hides that great beak of a nose is never explained.) If you cant regard this with a little bit of humor, he says, somebody is going to confuse you with a professor at the university. I mean, you get awfully tired of taking all this seriously. These magazines are interesting, but theyre not the word from ML Ziqn. sub-variet- Using the pen name Maxwell Grant, Gibson would end up writing 85 percent of the novels in the series. met him at a pulp convention five or six years ago, Sampson said. Hes a perfectly charming person and an extremely adroit magician. IF you dont watch out, hell take an egg out of your ear.) SAMPSONS BOOK has been published by Pulp Press, a virutally one-ma- n operation run by Robert Weinberg out of his home in the south Chicago suburb of Oak Forest. A native of New Jersey, Weinberg in the early 70s dropped out of Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was working oq (I used-magzi- , SAMPSON, WHO later graduated from Ohio State, didnt resume his great and dedicated passion until 1968, when he discovered he could order the old p4j.tjuough the maL I am ... , V 4 . fc ' t - i t M lUi . , t U t t i i u j . It. . i ,( 4 t . 4 A . M, J, |