An oveview of the pulp magazine world of the thirties and forties and ow it influenced my work...

( this article serves as introduction to the collected book: the Adventures of the Granite Man from Virtualtales.com)

Welcome to the world of Dr. Shadows, the world of the pulp adventure. It is a world that has faded into the mists of time to be devoured by and reborn in its own offspring, the paperback novel.

So named because of the cheap wood pulp it was produced on, the pulp magazine reigned supreme from the 1920s to the late 1940s with sensational garish colors on the covers and daring purpled prose within.

The “Bloody” pulps ran the gambit from “Range Romances” to Battle Aces, Gangster Molls and Fantastic Planetary Stories, but it was in the areas of detective and heroic fiction that they soared the highest.

Black Mask, the high watermark in gumshoes gave us Phillip Marlow, Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Race Williams, Oscar Sail and countless variations of the first truly American deductive champions, the hard boiled Private Eye. No effete Raffles or Peter Wimsey, these guys (and gals) were the hard workin’ blue collar heroes, tryin’ to make a buck and do the right thing. Cowboys in a concrete world. They rode an urban range and routed bank robbers, securities rustlers and Wall Street murderers with an old fashioned code of justice that owed as much to Ivanhoe as Bill Cody.

They may have been “Hardboiled” but they were by no means hard hearted, anything but; always a sucker for a sob story or a “dame in distress.” They faced impossible odds time and again to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, back on the magazine racks a phenomenon occurred: the Hero Pulp. Started by Street and Smith publications, a company with a long history in periodicals, including dime novel hero Nick Carter. The company decided to embrace the new medium – radio - with the Street and Smith Hour, where a narrator would read storied from their detective magazines as a long extended commercial for the book. As a gimmick they named the narrator “the shadow” with no thought to any other effect than to make the stories a bit spookier. No biggie, or so they thought.

Soon, however, letters poured into the publisher wanting to know more about this mysterious host. The publisher. A. Ralston. and editor John Nanovic quickly decided to rush a magazine titled “The Shadow” into production to protect a potentially lucrative property.

They had no idea who or what the Shadow was, but they knew just the right guy to write it, a magician/journalist cum pulp writer named Walter Gibson.

It was the perfect marriage of man and material: Gibson (under the house name of Maxwell Grant) created a fascinating dark crusader who, with his army of aides and agents, fought a constant war against the forces of gangdom.

The magazine was an instant hit, selling out month after month so consistently that Street and Smith began to issue it every other week, and Gibson, in heroic pulp writer tradition, kept pace churning out over two hundred and fifty Shadow novels at the astounding pace of one every three to four days!

Other publishers jumped on the band wagon with lesser “dark avengers” over the next few years: George Chance - the Green Ghost, the Green Lama (of the Tibetan variety), The Black Bat, The Red Mask, Street and Smith’s own the Whisperer, and the most successful and colorful of all, The Spider.

None equaled the heights the Shadow achieved in issuing in the Decade of the hero pulp.

Street and Smith tried to catch lightening in a bottle a second time in 1933 with a counterpoint to their dark Avenger with a bronze crusader named Doc Savage.

No lurker in the shadows this time, the good Doctor was a science-based good guy who did his combat with evil in the naked light of public exposure.

Once again the perfect man was hired to guide this champion’s fortunes under the house name of Kenneth Robeson: Lester Dent. Dent was an ex-telegrapher and inventor, a world traveler and very much like his literary child.

Many lesser Titans followed in Doc’ wake—Capt. Hazzard, The Avenger, Jim Wade, the Skipper, etc., but none held a candle to the metallic man’s success.

Just as the dime novel was eclipsed by the pulp so the magazines became the digests and the paperbacks.

Many pulp characters appeared directly or strongly influenced comic book offspring as well. Most notably the Man of Steel, Superman, owes much to the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage.

A few of the pulps limped along as digests and vast number of pulp stories, novels, and short stories were reprinted in paperback form.

This is where I come into the story. In 1964, Bantam Books began to reprint the Doc Savage books with dynamite James Bama covers (the pulp had ceased publication in 1949) aiming, rightly so, at the growing science fiction market. To say it was a phenomenal success would be an understatement. It caused a resurrection of many of its pulp brethren and inspired scores of imitators and pastiches.

Doc was my first conscious contact with the pulp world. I soon discovered the very active pulp fan community, among which Tom and Ginger Johnson’s Echoes stands out today a long with Paul McCall’s Aces and Howard Hopkins’s Bronze Gazette All of these were portals to the past.

Some say the pulp era was a more innocent time, but I think it was a time with different priorities and ethics.

I made up my mind to visit that time through the characters that lived there. Not someone else’s characters. (There is a whole school of writing that ascribes to creating new stories using the old characters while continuing the official continuity, such as Will Murray, had done with his exceptional Doc Savage stories. I feel this is a little sacrilegious).

I felt an original pulp hero was needed, but not one who was a ghost of some one else, no pastiche or Bronze or a Shadow’s shadow. I sought to create a character who could have graced the newsstand in the golden decade of the ‘30s and would have fit in as ”one of the guys.”

I searched for a bit to find the elements of the pulp greats that appealed to me the strongest: Doc Savage’s discipline and companions, the Avenger’s ashen skin, the Shadow’s mysterious eastern connections, the Green Lama’s spirituality, the Green Ghost’s use of stage magic, etc., and put all these elements into a pot to stew.

What bubbled to the surface was Anton Chadeaux, PhD who the world would come to know as Dr. Shadows.


Keep in mind as you read them that while I may have softened some of the more extreme views of some of the characters, villain and hero alike, I have not written a PC peon or pastiche of a 1930’s story.

I have done my best to write the time as it was; so don’t be ruffled by a derisive sneer or dismissive attitude; in the end goodness and toleration win out.

After all, it was simpler time - right?