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Title: Murder Trail
Series:
The Shadow #26
Authors: Maxwell Grant
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages:
159
Words: 49K
Publish: 1933
I liked the parts where The Shadow shoots it out with mobsters and is investigating Crix (any name with an “X” in it is automatically cooler than a name without), but the premise for the story rubbed me the wrong way.
You have a French guy who is going to collect 20million buckaroos from Americans, and is going to use that money for World Business Blah Blah Blah. In Europe. Blast it, we were subsidizing losers a hundred years ago. Boo to that. So that bit bugged me, but not enough to stir the rating needle down even half a star. It did make me wonder, did the author actually think this kind of philanthropy was viable? Especially in Europe, with Hitler on the rise? Some part of American society certainly thought so, or it wouldn’t have been in a pulp novel like this.
Reading The Shadow stories can be really odd. They are simple pulp stories that I enjoy, but later, when I go to write a review, all sorts of things pop into my head that I wasn’t thinking of when I read the story. It’s like my brain is a crock pot and The Shadow is a big batch of chili, just cooking away in the background.
Harry Vincent, The Shadow’s top agent, was in this story and amazingly, he didn’t get bopped on the head even once, or kidnapped or put in mortal peril. He was actually competent. It was how he should be :-D
★★★✬☆
From the Publisher and Bookstooge
A European philantropist was sending a secret emissary to America to collect money for the good of mankind. But where money was involved, no secret could be kept from the overlord of crime! The emissary himself was the first to die. Then followed cold-blooded murder after cold-blooded murder -- and with every innocent soul who died, more millions of dollars heaped up in the dark coffers of the underworld. The police were baffled -- for this was the work of an archvillian who called himself only "Crix," a criminal genius so adept at covering his tracks that no man alive could discern them. But The Shadow can, and does. Discovering that one of the so-called philanthropists is Crix, The Shadow and his agents confront Crix and kill him. The stolen money is recovered and naive, optimistic philanthropy can go on!
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