Over the past month I've read a couple of Classic Shadow pulp
novels and I’ve been listening almost every night to old Shadow radio shows.
This has, of course, caused me to compare and contrast and I have to say they
are incredibly different animals. The radio show centers on Lamont Cranston and
Margo Lane, his Girl Friday, but the pulps that I've read almost always have
the shadow as a peripheral character. In the novels he is constantly stalking
bad guys, listening and taking advantage of the weaknesses of various criminals
and their gangs. On the page he is ably assisted by his huge network of helpers
or undercover operatives. They occasionally make appearances in a way that push
the story along or explain to the reader how certain pieces of information are
being related back to the Shadow. I have to admit the two different versions of
the Shadow that the radio play and the pulps provide are both very entertaining
but I prefer the anthology nature of the pulp stories. I find that having the
main focus on the bad guy characters who are being hunted down by the
relentless Shadow with his blazing .45's to be much more entertaining. The Shadow
radio show has a tendency to fall pretty squarely into the standard mystery or
adventure radio shows of the 1930s with lots of bantering back and forth
between Lamont and Margo. Of course, I guess it would be natural that you
would need a couple of reoccurring characters who talked back and forth on a
regular basis presenting different pieces of information and pushing things in
the direction that a radio play would go. As I said, I've enjoyed them both and
I will continue to do so but the pulp novels are grittier and more to my taste
overall.
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