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Title: The Shadow’s Shadow
Series:
The Shadow #23
Authors: Maxwell Grant
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages:
154
Words: 48K
Publish: 1933
A criminal finally gets smart and figures out that The Shadow has agents and uses those agents to track down the alter-ego of The Shadow. Only thing is, said criminal doesn’t realize that The Shadow has multiple aliases. That means The Shadow still gets to beat the bad guys, on all fronts. We as readers also learn a possible history of The Shadow as a WWI ace pilot.
Another enjoyable pulp romp between the world wars. The action takes place in New York City and down into New Jersey a little bit. I’ve done enough traveling up and down the East Coast that I was actually familiar with some of the roads and tunnels described in the story. Not greatly familiar, but enough so that I could visualize things (I’m sure it looked totally different in 1933 than it did in the 1990’s, but come on, a tunnel is a tunnel, right?) and I just found that I liked that familiarity.
This was the 23rd Shadow novel and it’s taken that long for at least one bad guy to twig on to the fact that The Shadow might have an alter-ego. AMAZING!!! At first it made me shake my head but then I began to wonder, does it seem naive to me not because we are smarter as a society today but because we’re so much more evil? The utter gratuitousness of crime today is beyond what they could have imagined back in 1933. It made me ashamed to be honest. Of course, then people like Ira Levin come along a mere 20 years later and write books like A Kiss Before Dying and I realize the rot was already at the heart of the tree even back then. Which makes me feel better, because I realize that people were just as evil back in the 1930’s as they are today.
"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world"
★★★✬☆
From the Publisher & Bookstooge
It was to be the perfect crime. A daring heist that would net the greedy mobsters undreamed-of millions. And with internation criminal mastermind Felix Zubian and ace gunman Gat Hackett at the head of the determined gang, nothing could go wrong.
Nothing, that is, except the unwelcome intervention of The Shadow, phantom of the night, scourge of evildoers everywhere. The conspirators of crime h it upon a grim, ingenious scheme--use The Shadow's own dreaded techniques of stealth and surprise against him. In short, shadow The Shadow--and blast him into the grave!
An International criminal, Felix Zubian, trails The Shadow. It is revealed that during WWI, Zubian learned of an aviator in the air forces of the United States, one called "The Black Eagle," because of his penchant for flying at night. Zubian believes he has found the aviator who has now taken on a new identity as The Shadow!
The Shadow knows the evil in men’s hearts though and turns the tables on the gang and destroys them where they thought to destroy him.
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