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Thread: Walter B Gibson - Creator of The Shadow

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    Danny62 Guest

    Walter B Gibson - Creator of The Shadow

    Created two popular characters: The Shadow, aka Lamont Cranston, aka Kent Allard, who heads an organization devoted to fighting crime and about whom Gibson wrote 283 novelettes; and Norgil, aka Loring, a stage magician.

    Is compared with 'John Dickson Carr' for bringing to the mystery novel a sense of illusion and misdirection.

    Wrote the stories about "The Shadow" under the name of Maxwell Grant, derived from the names of two magic dealers whom he knew.
    President William Howard Taft praised a story the young Gibson had won a literary prize for and predicted he would be a successful writer.

    Though he began as a reporter, Gibson had loved stage magic since childhood and collaborated with Harry Houdini, Howard Thurston, and Harry Blackstone. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gibson wrote for magazines, some self-help books, new magic books, and two novels. When he met (not his first wife) Pearl Raymond, a professional magician, he launched into writing novels in a serious way. Later in life, Gibson lectured on magic and earned two awards from the Academy of Magical Arts.

    He was the first (and most prolific) person to write "The Shadow" novels under the name "Maxwell Grant", but he was not the only one. "Maxwell Grant", although Gibson's idea, became a property of magazine publisher Street & Smith

    In 1931 Walter switched from syndicate writing to mystery fiction. He accepted a year's contract to deliver four stories involving a character to be called "The Shadow." These were 75,000 word pulps. When the first two sold out, the publication was then published monthly. In March 1932 Walter was given a contract to deliver 1,440,000 words, which meant 24 stories at 60,000 words each, during the coming year. Then the magazine could be published twice a month. This was the largest output ever demanded in a single year that involved stories featuring a single mystery character. Walter completed the assignment in 10 months, and he did four more stories in the next two months, for a total that year of 1,680,000 words!

    This achievement prompted the Corona Typewriter Company to use his accomplishment in an ad selling their typewriters. In 1933 Walter was pictured in a life-sized window display developed by Corona in New York City that proclaimed, "MAKING A RECORD WITH A RECORD-MAKER. TWO CHAMPIONS - THE CORONA AND THE SHADOW. Corona is a good typewriter, but Maxwell Grant is a great type writer -- and THE SHADOW is one of the most amazing types in all fiction."
    In later years a headline summarized his Shadow story output by saying, "A Million Words A Year for Ten Straight Years." If the writing of these novels under Walter's pen name of Maxwell Grant is included, the actual average was much higher.

    In March 1934 The Shadow Magazine became a monthly, and later it appeared every other month. Finally in the summer of 1949 it became a quarterly. By then Walter B. Gibson had written 282 Shadow novels as Maxwell Grant. It was only in the fifteenth year of writing "The Shadow" that he dropped below the million word a year average.

    Walter also produced "The Shadow" comic scripts, along with 23 novelettes about a character called "Norgil the Magician," under the Maxwell Grant pseudonym. The novelettes totaled about 175,000 words. In 1946, under his own name, he created two 60,000 word mysteries entitled "A Blond For Murder," and "Looks That Kill."

    Sep 12, 1897-Dec 6, 1985
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    Last edited by Danny62; 12-02-2007 at 04:10 PM.

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