Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  Schmidt is a man of sensibility but he has never been sentimental. He has at least never fallen into sentimentality when I’ve been around. On one occasion when he wandered into the television tubes where I didn’t follow him, he handled an investigation in what seemed to me a grossly and shamefully sentimental fashion. Every scrap of evidence lay against a teenage boy and for no reason either logical or evidential the inspector pinned the rap on a mature man.

  He stoutly denies, however, that even then he was moved by sentiment. He says he was merely adapting to the exigencies of the milieu in which he was forced to operate.

  “In a mere thirty minutes of air time,” he said, “and with all those minutes they take away for the commercials, there isn’t the elbow room for building a solid, logical proof of guilt. You have to move on instinct and intuition. My instincts are solid and my intuition is infallible. The guy was guilty, wasn’t he? So what if there wasn’t a scrap of evidence against him?”

  It’s a good defense, but I still think Inspector Schmidt was temporarily affected by cathode-ray poisoning. He’s had no relapses since, but it may be because he’s been staying out of the tube.

  As any detective must, the inspector uses informants, but he has never left it to them to do his job for him. He is a firm believer in the presumption of innocence but an even firmer believer in the all-pervading prevalence of mendacity. He listens carefully to what people tell him, be they witnesses, victims, informants, or suspects, but he takes what they tell him just as he takes any material clues that come his way. He examines either with searching skepticism, evaluating it in terms of its relevance and of the way it fits when juxtaposed to the other available evidence.

  Growing up in New York, the inspector was educated in the New York public schools. They taught him to read. Back in his day they were doing that. Departmental reports shower down on his desk and I’ve never known him to experience even the slightest difficulty in assimilating them. They taught him to write. He produces his own reports and they are never less than lucid and grammatical. The more colorful treatments he leaves in my hands. They taught him arithmetic. No matter how multitudinous the suspects he must keep in mind, he’s never been known to lose count of even one of them.

  They taught him some Latin. I’ve heard him quote from Caesar’s Gallic Wars, but only the opening sentence. If they took him beyond “All Gaul is divided in three parts,” no more of it has gone with him into adult life.

  He is a brilliant logician, but through the quality of his mind and not through learning. I can remember a case when in the course of the investigations I came up with a complicated theory of what had occurred. The inspector rejected it out of hand and he explained that in any situation where you are confronted with a choice of theories you take on the simplest one that will contain the evidence.

  When he heard me mutter “Occam’s razor,” he thought my mind was wandering as it often will—his never does—and that I was talking about some throat-slashing episode that had nothing to do with the case in hand. I had to explain to him that this was a razor that was employed neither for shaving nor for throat slitting, but that it was a cutting edge of philosophical thought, a principle of logic enunciated early in the fourteenth century by a Franciscan friar named William of Occam. If a man has a mind like Inspector Schmidt’s, he can be totally ignorant of the jargon of the logicians and, nonetheless, be brilliantly logical in his pursuit of proof.

  Since he went to school in Manhattan, he profited greatly from the extracurricular aspects of his education. Early on, before chin or lip showed even the faintest sprouting of the down of an adolescent’s beard, the youthful NFI NMI Schmidt achieved a profound understanding of the ways of crime and a sympathetic penetration into the tortuous complexities of the criminal mind. He learned through observation of his schoolfellows. He learned then and he has never forgotten that no crime is committed without reason. It need not be a good reason, but there always is a reason and one that seemed good to the perpetrator.

  The inspector has no hobbies. Chasing killers gives him all the exercise needed by any man unless perhaps he is a professional athlete. Schmidt is a professional cop and he is all cop. If it should be argued that a man must do something for relaxation, Schmitty does do something. He takes his shoes off and he wiggles his toes.

  The inspector might be described as insular, but only insofar as he is almost always confined to the one island—Manhattan. I do recall one case which did take him as far afield as Brooklyn. He was dealing with a freshly sunburned corpse. It became necessary that he extend his investigation to a beach, and, true Manhattanite that he is, he immediately thought of Coney Island.

  Otherwise, on those few occasions when he has left town it has been on my account. I have suburban friends and exurban friends and there have been times when murder has intruded on one of these. Out of friendship Inspector Schmidt comes to the rescue. On at least two occasions he has gone even farther afield on my account. There was the time when I was doing a term as writer in residence at a jerkwater college way up in New England. I came down with a bad case of freshly murdered corpse. It was on my doorstep. Schmitty came up and coped. Happily he was fully as effective among the meadows and woodlots as he is in the city streets.

  The other time was even farther afield. I was in Madrid and likewise afflicted with a freshly murdered corpse. It was a disastrously sticky situation since it happened to be the corpse of a member of the Guardia Civil. There is no police force anywhere that takes kindly to cop killers, but if you know anything at all about the Guardia Civil, you must know that no presumption of innocence has ever taken lodgment under their shiny patent-leather hats.

  The inspector came to the rescue. Through the exercise of exquisite tact, even past the language barrier, he managed to insert himself into the investigation and save my neck.

  Inspector Schmidt enjoys his food and drink, but unlike his great French colleague, Inspector Maigret, he never drinks on the job. As other men take aspirin for headache, Maigret takes beer. Schmidt, however, takes neither. He doesn’t have headaches and beer does nothing for his feet. Again unlike Maigret, he does not, when hot on the trail of a killer, take time out for the leisurely ingestion and appreciation of a superb meal. Many’s the time when I have been with him on one of his killer hunts that I have wished he could be different. Logic and pursuit anesthetize his taste buds and generate in him digestive juices fully up to the job of dealing with the execrable ham sandwiches, the soggy wedges of apple pie, and the corrosive coffee he finds in the nearest quick-and-dirty when lull in the pursuit gives him a moment to take on something he needs for keeping up his strength.

  A French friend has expostulated with me on this subject.

  “Your Inspector Schmidt,” he said, “drinks too much coffee and he eats the wrong food. It is a wonder that it has not already done irreparable damage to his tripes, but it will. It must. You should use your influence with him. Persuade him to eat properly. Induce him to take a glass of good wine or even a cognac instead of another of those too numerous bad coffees. All work and no cuisine makes Jacques a dull flic.”

  My French friend doesn’t know the inspector as I do. He underestimates the man. Inspector Schmidt is a latter-day Achilles. North of the feet he is invulnerable.

  The Shadow

  Maxwell Grant

  “WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”

  Probably no lines in the history of radio, or perhaps in the history of detective fiction, are more famous. And no character stalked the perpetrators of evil more relentlessly than the almost supernatural phantom known only as The Shadow.

  In the spring of 1931, Street & Smith published the first issue of The Shadow magazine, which contained a novel written by Walter B. Gibson, under the pen name of Maxwell Grant. The character was instantly successful and the magazine ran for 325 issues, each with a short novel about the spectral personage sometimes known as Lamont Cranston. Under the Grant pseudonym, G
ibson personally wrote 282 of those novels (and later wrote one for book publication under his own name), while the famous nom de plume was also used by the other writers who produced the remaining 43 novels in the series. For fifteen years Gibson wrote a million words a year, yet still found enough free time to create another popular pulp detective hero; Norgil the Magician, who used his knowledge of stage magic in the solution of crimes. A student of Houdini, Gibson ghostwrote books for him and Thurston, and became a premier stage magician himself.

  The radio program chronicling the adventures of The Shadow began on the Mutual Network in 1936, as a spin-off from the magazine. The anonymous narrator, played for a time by Orson Welles, introduced each weekly melodrama with the unforgettable lines, followed by a mirthful, if sinister, laugh.

  The 80-year-old Gibson, still a prolific author of books and articles on magic, lives in Eddyville, New York.

  The Shadow

  by Maxwell Grant

  IF EVER A MYSTERY CHARACTER created himself in his own image, that character was The Shadow. From a nebulous nothing, he materialized into a substantial something, then merged with enshrouding darkness like a figment of the night itself—terms that were to be used to describe his comings and goings in nearly three hundred novels that were dedicated exclusively to his adventures over a span of more than fifteen consecutive years.

  To say that The Shadow sprang spontaneously into being would be putting it not only mildly, but exactly. As a factual writer, with an eye toward fiction, I had been thinking in terms of a mysterious personage who would inject himself into the affairs of lesser folk, aiding friends who would do his bidding and balking foemen who tried to thwart his aims. So when I learned that an editor was looking for a writer to do a story about a so-far undefined character to be known as The Shadow, it marked a meeting of the minds.

  From then on, The Shadow took over, both in a literal and a literary sense. In order to assure his own evolution and give it plausibility, The Shadow needed an amanuensis to transcribe his annals into a palatable, popular form. That, of course, demanded The Shadow’s own official sanction, hence the opening paragraph was attributed to the leading character himself. It ran:

  This is to certify that I have made careful examination of the manuscript known as The Living Shadow as set down by Mr. Maxwell Grant, my raconteur, and do find it a true account of my activities upon that occasion. I have therefore arranged that Mr. Grant shall have exclusive privilege to such further of my exploits as may be considered of interest to the American public.

  —THE SHADOW

  With such a send-off, the story just couldn’t miss. As Maxwell Grant, a pen name that was concocted for use with The Shadow stories only, I was ostensibly under The Shadow’s orders as much as the agents who obeyed his bidding or as the hapless victims of conniving criminals whom only The Shadow could rescue from the brink of doom. Even the title of the first story, The Living Shadow, established The Shadow as an actual personage and the central theme in the minds of avidly susceptible readers. The titles of the next two novels, The Eyes of The Shadow and The Shadow Laughs, continued the same motif.

  In those early stories, The Shadow moved in and out of the affairs of friend and foe, not only as a cloaked figure, but as a master of disguise who could adopt various personalities, even doubling as a crook in order to confuse other criminals. Actually, there was nothing that The Shadow couldn’t do, which made it all the easier to describe the things he did do. From those, he developed not only his own personality, but his own background. Whatever he had to have, he saw to it that he had it and Maxwell Grant said so.

  Early in the game, it became evident that The Shadow, whoever he was, needed a million dollars or more to knock down criminals who were thriving during the Depression. So he identified himself as a wealthy resident of suburban New Jersey answering to the name of Lamont Cranston. Then, when even Maxwell Grant was convinced that The Shadow had disclosed his actual identity, it turned out that he was simply doubling for Lamont Cranston when the millionaire was taking extended trips abroad. By switching from Cranston to other identities, including his cloaked self, he continually kept enemies off his trail.

  This, however, could cause complications whenever Cranston returned home, but The Shadow offset those by switching to the personality of George Clarendon, a man-about-town whose favorite habitat was Manhattan’s exclusive Cobalt Club. He played that role long enough to lure crooks along a false trail from which he vanished, never to reappear as Clarendon. Until then, The Shadow had often visited police headquarters, doubling for a dull-mannered janitor named Fritz, in order to listen in on the reports of Joe Cardona, an ace detective. But with Clarendon permanently gone from the Cobalt Club, Cranston was free to appear there and cultivate the acquaintance of Police Commissioner Weston, a regular member, who frequently summoned Joe Cardona to confer on crime developments after the ace detective had been promoted to inspector.

  Meanwhile, The Shadow conducted his own investigations in the seclusion of a black-walled room that served as his sanctum. Under the glow of a bluish light, his hands opened reports from agents and inscribed orders that they were to follow. His identifying token, a scintillating girasol, or fire opal, gleamed from the third finger of his left hand, flashing rays that exerted a hypnotic effect upon many persons whom he encountered while on the rove.

  One analyst who read The Shadow novels closely came up with the opinion that the somber, eerie, isolated atmosphere of the sanctum undoubtedly aided The Shadow in reasoning out his brilliant deductions and battle plans with no fear of secret watchers who might attack him. This analysis was dated back to The Shadow’s role as a spy in World War I, when, as an American air ace called the Dark Eagle, he pretended to be shot down over Germany and, using disguises by day and black garb at night, worked his way back to the Allied lines, releasing many prisoners and guiding them along the route to safety.

  From this, the analyst assumed that The Shadow “had to work out his plans in out of the way places or at night; and the constant fear of being seen or found out no doubt left a major impact on his way of thinking or manner of working.” Hence The Shadow’s need for a secure sanctum when he returned to the United States and decided to combat the postwar crime wave that was rampant there.

  Actually, this shows the remarkable impact that The Shadow, through Maxwell Grant, had upon the constant readers of his chronicles. Among the millions of words devoted to his current adventures, there were probably only several hundred referring directly to his earlier career. Those formed a separate section of The Shadow’s archives, to which Maxwell Grant had only occasional access, hence analytical readers were forced to form their own theories. But in this instance, it went wide on two counts:

  First, The Shadow had recourse to his sanctum only when operating within range of his fixed base in Manhattan, never when adventures carried him far afield. Again, in none of his numerous adventures was the word “fear” ever applied personally to The Shadow; indeed, he could be well described as totally unemotional throughout. It was The Shadow’s utter impassivity that won him loyal agents who supported him in his campaigns against crime. As his forays expanded, The Shadow came into conflict with formidable antagonists, whose own cryptic identities became titles for the stories in which most of them met their deserved doom, notably, The Silent Seven, The Black Master, The Crime Cult, The Blackmail Ring, The Ghost Makers, Kings of Crime, and Six Men of Evil.

  These involved spy rings, murder cults, mad scientists, and haunted houses, which in turn brought new agents and specialists into The Shadow’s fold. At times, The Shadow’s exploits became topical: when New York police were baffled by a real-life terrorist who signed himself “Three X,” The Shadow met and conquered his fictional counterpart in the form of “Double Z.” These themes could prove prophetic, too: The Black Hush foreshadowed New York City’s “blackout” by thirty years, while another novel, The Star of Delhi, called the turn on a jewel robbery that occurred two decades later.r />
  Most important, however, were the supervillains who developed during The Shadow’s saga. The mere turning of “shadow into substance” produced new prospects, most notably a parade of intermittent rivals, such as the Cobra, the Python, the Condor, the Green Hoods, the Hydra and the Voodoo Master. During most of this expansive period, which included a total of 125 novels written during a six-year period, The Shadow so identified himself as Lamont Cranston that their personalities virtually merged and became a classic in their own right. This gradually lessened the value of other identities that The Shadow assumed whenever occasion demanded, but when matters neared a crux, he was ready with the answer.

  In a novel titled The Shadow Unmasks, the real Lamont Cranston was injured in a British air crash, forcing The Shadow to revert to his real self, that of an aviator named Kent Allard, who had disappeared in a flight over the Guatemalan jungle years before. The Shadow took off secretly for Yucatan and emerged from the wilds with two bodyguards from a tribe of Xinca Indians who had presumably worshipped him as a “bird god” during those lost years, though actually he had been combatting crime as The Shadow, all that while.

  In due course, The Shadow reverted to the Cranston guise but occasionally switched to Allard, one advantage being that he could team with the real Cranston, who by now was familiar with The Shadow’s ways and always willing to go along with them. In due course, The Shadow reverted more and more to the Cranston role, so that Allard became almost forgotten, except on rare occasions when his identity could prove helpful in diverting crooks from Cranston’s trail. In the opinion of some readers, The Shadow apparently “felt more comfortable when he was Cranston,” but perhaps it was the readers who felt that way. Whichever the case, it worked out as intended.