PULP FICTIONS: THE SPIDER & THE SHADOW more reading from Isolation Row

When I was in college I discovered The Shadow, the answer to the question ‘who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’ Before he became the subject of a hit radio show, in which he was voiced by Orson Welles, The Shadow appeared the pulp magazines, 325 novels, published twice a month at its peak. Walter Gibson, writing under the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote 287 of them. I came across the first of the Signet reprints of his pulp exploits, The Living Shadow, which I probably read in the summer of 1970. It had a striking cover by an artist identified as Kossim, who I later learned was Sanford Kossim, and as my reading at the time was largely comic books and sf, it was a perfect fit that summer, which was the time I was deciding whether or not I should return for my third year of college — the student strike and my own lack of academic engagement had me pondering my future.

The Shadow did not draw me back to university, but among other things it probably influenced my decision to concentrate on the subjects I felt I needed to study, mostly those involving literature, one of which was American Studies. In that class, for the exceptional professor Richard Slotkin, I wrote my final paper on The Shadow, some 55 pages, in which among other things I drew a comparison with Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence Man, whose Signet paperback edition, the…