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Title: The Golden Grotto
Series:
The Shadow #29
Authors: Maxwell Grant
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages:
145
Words: 44K
Publish: 1933
For whatever reason, I had a very good time reading this, despite the fact that Harry Vincent gets kidnapped, yet again.
There are three potential villains who Harry is investigating and one of them was so obvious that I knew it couldn’t be him, because all the clues (or clews) were pointing at him. So it came down to an artist or a psychologist. My bet was the artist because most of them are bleeding commies at heart but of course I was wrong. That is why I don’t gamble. No matter my reasoning, or second guessing myself, I usually pick the wrong “thing”. I was ok with that though, because this is a book and I don’t mind being wrong about the outcome of a story :-D
Now I am going to go down a rabbit trail a bit. The word “clew”. The Shadow novels use this variant spelling of the word “clue” since the beginning and use it consistently. I did a little bit of googling and “clew” was/is an old time spelling that fell out of use in the 1700 and 1800’s when some standardization was applied to the English language, ie, “clew” to “clue” or “blew” to “blue”. Therefore, the author’s use of it is deliberate and not just the way they wrote it in the 1930’s. Now, “why” he did that is something I can only speculate on. My first guess is that he was a grouchy old crank who wanted to educate the stupid kids of his day with some semi-classical english spellings so they wouldn’t grow up to read nothing but comic books and rot their brains. My second guess is that because “clew” was still an acceptable variant, he wanted to use it simply because he could. Nobody was going to tell him what words he could or could not use! My third, and final, gess (I’m ahead of the curve here by removing the “u”. Totally new-new-new-new wave here) is that he was just being a douche. Some people are like that, just because. I can identify though, because I still use “Dostoyevsky” and refuse all other spellings, no matter how prevalent they become.
★★★✬☆
From Bookstooge
A psychologist who is a Utopian, selects a group to start his experiments on. To further his aims, he steals two million in gold and kidnaps several influential people. The Shadow gets on the case, sends in Harry Vincent to an area where the gold was probably dropped off. Vincent gets kidnapped, The Shadow attacks the cruise ship where all the other people are and he eventually rescues Vincent and the kidnappee’s from a grotto. The psychologist tries to drown everyone but ends up just killing himself. The gold is returned and The Shadow lets Harry Vincent take all the glory for rescuing everyone.
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