Chronology of Shadows: A Timeline of The Shadow's Exploits by Rick Lai is a great resource for fans and agents of The Shadow. Author Rick Lai provides us with a dated chronology of The Shadow's adventures in the pulp magazines.
The book is 119 pages long and has some great information on The Shadow's exploits as well as The Shadow's activities before he became The Shadow. The book's introduction clearly explains the book's purpose, "This article is an attempt to create a coherent chronology of the published exploits of The Shadow." While there are references to The Shadow radio show, there is no significant information on them nor does Mr. Lai try to reconcile the activities and adventures of The Shadow on radio and in print.
One of my favorite sections of the book is a highly detailed look at the early years of The Shadow. Mr. Lai definitely did his research and I found this section very helpful in understanding the activities of The Shadow as well as his world travels and abilities he learned overseas.
The biggest section of the book looks at each Shadow pulp story and gives it a date when the events occurred. For example, The Living Shadow, the first Shadow story, is noted as having occurred in November of 1929. The events in Gangdom's Doom, the fifth Shadow story, are dated to have happened in March of 1931. There are some interesting notes in this section as well, but there are not extensive notes on the story plot. Some stories just have a date listed as when they occurred with no additional notes.
I don't have a hard copy of the book, but I did purchase an eBook copy for my Kindle. I've enjoyed reading it and I recommend it as a good resource for fans and agents of The Shadow!
In this article I want to take a look at what has become my favorite The Shadow resource - one that I highly recommend to all fans and agents of The Shadow. It is "The Shadow In Review" by John Olsen. I consider John Olsen a Shadow scholar and you can find him on the Pulp Net and his The Shadow in Review site.
"The Shadow In Review" is a big book loaded with 519 pages! The cover says it all - "The Ultimate Guide to the Pulp Magazine Series." The cover has the classic The Shadow title, a stack of Shadow pulp magazines and a mysterious Shadow silhouette!
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| Front Cover |
Inside the pages you will find a complete review of each of The Shadow's pulp magazine stories along with the published title, proposed title, date submitted by the author, publish date and author. There are additional reviews of The Shadow stories written by Walter Gibson and published in the 1960s and after. You get a total of 336 Shadow stories reviewed!
Not only do you get a review of the story, Mr. Olsen also weaves in extra information about the story or characters. One thing I love is his rating of each story. Each story is rated on a scale of 0 to 5 as indicated by The Shadow's .45 automatics! Stories with 0 automatics are 'terrible' and the ones with a 5 automatics rating are a 'must read'!
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The appendices in the back of the book are invaluable. Mr. Olsen provides a list of Shadow stories by subject, by story and by the aforementioned rating system. He also provides information on The Shadow movie serial and the 1994 Shadow movie. I've used the appendices quite often in my research and reading about The Shadow. Here's an example of how I've used them. Let's say I want to read about the character Steve Cronin. Using the Index by Subject I can see a list of every Shadow story he was in and how many times he was referenced! Want to know how many times the Cobalt Club is mentioned - it's there as well! Not only are people and places indexed, you will also find lists of The Shadow's weapons, gadgets, and vehicles!
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| Back Cover |
That's a brief look at The Shadow in Review! (If you want more information on ordering a copy, please click here.) As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, I highly recommend this resource to every Shadow fan and agent. It's a tremendous resource that I refer to quite often and am very glad to have in my library.
