Hands in the Dark

The Shadow Pulp #10

by Maxwell Grant, Walter B. Gibson

Pyramid #N3557, 1975. First printing in VG+ condition. Rubs to the spine tips and two faint creases to the front wrapper. Cover by Steranko. Some of this is okay, but "First printing in VG+ condition. Rubs to the spine tips and two faint creases to the front wrapper." is specific to one seller's copy of the book and should not be part of the general product description. Better to remove that and just leave it as "Pyramid #N3557, 1975. Cover by Steranko."

Genres: Pulp, Thriller, Pulp Adventure, Fiction

187 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Maxwell Grant was a pseudonym often used by Walter B. Gibson to write stories of "The Shadow".

Reviews

[Benji's Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the good ones. Disclaimer: there's quite a few of those in the series.

[Juho Pohjalainen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bunch of crooks go looking for a hidden cache - a modern-day urban pirate booty, almost. People die and vigilantes take interest.

One of the stronger entries in the series, I should say. The best opening so far, a bit of a mystery that does not involve The Shadow yet and makes one wonder who the bad guys even are, and much is still seen from the villains' perspective, as is only proper... but once The Shadow does show up he's around a little bit too much, and many of the usual quibbles persist.

[Camilo Carrasco · Rating 4 out of 5]

En esta extraña ocasión el libro es demasiado corto.
Claro, es un libro de bolsillo hecho en 1932. De esos que venían en los periódicos, pero sí hace falta muchísimas más páginas para entender a tantos personajes involucrados en esta historia de misterio.
La historia te mantiene curioso de inicio a fin. Todo empieza con el asesinato de una persona y el robo de identidad de otra. Me gusta que la historia siempre mantiene a La Sombra como un ser misterioso del que nada se sabe más allá que le gusta hacer el bien porque es lo justo y punto. Realmente él no es el personaje principal. Y eso es lo complicado de este libro. Es difícil establecer quién es el personaje principal. Todos tienen una participación importante y no desperdiciada en la historia, pero si te deja con ganas de mucho más. Pero como dije antes, es un libro de bolsillo hecho con la intención de distraerte durante un día. Muy divertido y sin duda vale la pena leer esta historia de La Sombra.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man stands to inherit a fortune from his uncle, but disappears and is replaced by an impostor who is part of a gang seeking said fortune. The Shadow has quite a complex mystery to unravel this time around. This is a good, fast-paced story with a great noir atmosphere.

[Iain · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good enough Shadow story... and a good mystery, sort of. We start with the coded symbols shown on the original cover, and the mystery is what they might indicate. Beyond that, little is mysterious, though there are surprises along the way. We mostly know who the killers are, we know what they're up to, and it's just a matter of watching them make their way toward their objective while knowing that The Shadow is always just over their shoulders. I came away feeling positively about this one, though I'm not sure exactly why that is. I think it had a few key moments that I found particularly enjoyable and it elevated my feelings toward the story, but really this one is strictly middle of the road and three stars. That said, there were some ideas here that could form a really interesting tale.

As another reviewer mentioned, this is a Shadow story where he's not the main character (not uncommon), but instead we're seeing events unfold more like a heist caper, except one of the problems this heist faces is that The Shadow is lurking out there in the darkness, a little like the monster they know is coming to get them. I hadn't thought of it like that before now, but I enjoy that angle now that I think about it, and I kind of wish the flipped-script horror movie aspect had perhaps been played up a little more. Rather than thugs eager to "get The Shadow," it'd be interesting to see this same kind of dynamic but with the thugs losing their minds over this monster under their beds. We do, however, get to see Wing Toy, a wise Tong leader who straddles cultures and traditions, who is willing to provide a clever trap, but also makes it clear that he has no fight with The Shadow and sure doesn't want to start one.

But I can't help feeling like The Shadow doesn't get a great performance evaluation on this one. (Trying to avoid outright spoilers, but I'm talking about the gist of how the story goes here.) He was on the ball and had a pretty good idea of what was going on at any given time, but he wasn't exactly saving the day in this. A few people were rescued from death because he showed up at the right time, others died because he did not get there in time, and a few villains died because of his involvement, but overall it kind of feels like the body count would be the same either way, and The Shadow's involvement only traded a few good and bad lives and sought to redirect the treasure once located. Good accomplishments mostly, but when the hero's deal is that he "knows," I find it hard not to leave this story feeling like too many innocent people didn't get the chance to wish he'd known a little better, or a little faster.

We do get to see a few good Shadow capabilities in this one, though it's not his most impressive. He's able to glance at a paper, memorize the strange figures, and perfectly recreate it later. He uses at least three of his entirely convincing (except the eyes) disguises, plus one of his standards (Clarendon), in addition to appearing in public as a less distinct form of his Shadow incarnation. Plus, almost a spoiler but I think something worth noting for this story: The Dark Knight interrogation scene, where suddenly Batman appears in the room? We sort of get a version of that here, and it's pretty awesome if you visualize it.

I'm left with some questions, which will be spoilers:
• Just why did The Shadow allow so many innocent people to die? Was he just too far behind in each case to even realize they were in danger, and that it was necessary to keep eyes on these thugs every time they went out to visit someone? It starts to feel a little like Batman's Joker problem: Letting the villain live allows the story to keep going, and to find out who all the plotters are, where and what the loot is, but maybe The Shadow could have located the real Bob without letting the killers wander around killing? And then figured out where the loot was on his own, after cleaning up the more urgent problems? Not to advocate for a more bloodthirsty Shadow than I actually want to see in these pulps, but if he'd gunned the gang the first time he entered the house, a number of innocent lives would have been saved. Instead this story is full of collateral damage, I guess because The Shadow needed to let things play out longer to determine who was the head and how could the real Bob be rescued. Although I'm not sure he knew Bob was still alive when he made the decision to give these murderers more leash.
• What was The Shadow's actual plan on the train? To wound the villain, but do no more, leave him there unguarded and only slightly incapacitated, leave two loaded guns as a part of setting the scene, and then rely on ducking out with the loot (to leave where?) but getting back in time to "find" his "partner" killed by the criminal, at which point he... what? Finishes him off and bails? He could have done that already. Sticks around to hold him and keep things safe? He wouldn't do that. And we'll never know because the timing got screwed up, he was delayed in whatever he intended to do when he got back to the scene, and instead all hell broke loose and more people got injured and killed, the train car got shot up, and the other passengers were put in danger. As Shadow plans go this was not a very tight one, which is hard to accept when the first step on arrival was... walking up to the bad guy while he's asleep and waking him up. The situation started out completely under control, but The Shadow's complications allowed things to get out of hand.
• This isn't really a question so much as an observation, but why does The Shadow's level of power seem to fluctuate so much in the last handful of stories? I think this one actually gave us a really good balance of knowing a lot but not all, and being incredibly formidable but still challenged. However, when he enters the Chinatown hideout he only survives through luck, which I think should never be the case with him. He only figured out the puzzle because someone else's reaction to the situation in the moment gave him a second chance at it. And we once again see use of his incredible disguise capabilities, which extend to the point of almost a shape-shifting superpower with the way he's able to study someone and then transform his face into theirs so perfectly that it fools his close associates (an ability we haven't seen since way back in Eyes of The Shadow nearly a year before, when he became Pedro on the spot). But we're also establishing a second weakness to his abilities to fool perceptions: His strangely large shadow remains visible whatever form he takes, and now we see also that his glistening, glowing eyes are noticeable even at a distance if someone gets a clear look at them. I would think this to be a severe limitation on the effectiveness of his disguises, so I'm interested to see if that weakness disappears in future stories. As with so many elements of The Shadow, the fun is in the mystery, so there might not be a satisfactory answer given, but it definitely leaves me wondering if The Shadow's ability to just become a completely convincing Mongol guard or random mobster on the spot (ha) is a combination of both makeup and mind-clouding that has something to do with his eyes, not just his girasol as we've seen when he implants hypnotic suggestions. Do his eyes give away his impersonations precisely because he's utilizing a power of them to strengthen the illusion, while his own identities don't require that, and so don't stand out as prominently? That'd perhaps make for a good explanation of why his disguises are sometimes incredible and sometimes rather easy to see through. Then again, we saw a few books back how he put on glasses to partially hide his glittering eyes when he wanted to talk to someone incognito, so I guess at least in this period we're supposed to accept that every version of The Shadow we ever see can be recognized by a stiff, waxy face and glittering eyes.
• Did Gibson intend for the code to be what it ended up being all along, or did he come up with that near the end?? Because, and I didn't even realize this until another reviewer pointed it out, the thugs successfully find the people they need to find by working out what the code might say... but in the end we learn their guess at it was completely inaccurate, so the fact that their work led them where they needed to go had to be pure coincidence... or just a plot hole. They selected the correct people to look into, out of an address book of dozens of names, just by getting lucky.

Also it's worth noting that this story takes place when they were still pushing the idea that the character on the radio was the real Shadow, so this book once more elaborates on how he takes time off from fighting evil to do his radio broadcast, sometimes slipping in unnoticed amongst the actors.

Overall, a pretty decent story. Not one of the epic ones, but not one of the tedious ones either. I just wish there'd been more Shadow and less of the hoods, because the hoods aren't interesting characters themselves, and I'm left wondering what The Shadow was doing during those long stretches when we didn't see him at work and the villains had a surprisingly free hand to snoop and plot and murder. This story inhabits an interesting sort of pre-noir 30s mansion gothic horror murder mystery atmosphere; it can be a little dreary when it's just the thugs hanging out in the mansion, but great stuff when the focus turns to secret tunnels and The Shadow creeping through a dark mansion seeking answers and quietly taking out hoodlums as necessary.

[Leothefox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murders and oddities are piling up at a mansion, and Bob Galvin, who'd been away in South Africa, doesn't seem to be his old self. A dead man was found on the floor of the study, after discovering a sheet of weird symbols. Who knows what's behind it all?

This is the 10th “The Shadow” book of the original 1930s series. We get no Lamont Cranston in this entry, but Harry Vincent does make a small appearance. Some past agents see mention, but mostly we're dealing with new characters. Oddly enough, the reader is thrust into the murder mansion and kept there for the early part of the story, never breaking away to headlines and The Shadow's hands cutting out clippings to make sense of the mystery.

“Hands in the Dark” (love the title), has got a pair of strangling hands in the dark, it's got a trap chamber in a gangster's lair which pumps gas to subdue the curious, it has gangsters with a mysterious chief who are looking for associates of a dead man based on the numbers of letters in their names, it has an innocent woman caught in the crossfire, hidden chambers in basements, a detective who routinely ignores a recurring clue, messages left by dying men, impersonation, a shootout in a traincar, one dead uncle, a progression of deaths, and plenty of The Shadow.

As with most entries in the series (I've read 12 of the 300+...) the main focus is not characters or lots of elaborate action, but on the mystery itself. We've got some villains right off the bat, but in the beginning we don't know who they're working for, the meaning of the clues they follow, and some of the details which prove vital by the end.

There are some nice touches in the 10th entry, and I like the gothic mansion bit, but it's not as much fun as, say, “The Red Menace” or various others.

I do intend reading more of these soon. Even if I'm not packing in as many books as I used to, I need to keep up on my 1930s series!

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would have been hard-pressed myself to come up with a title for this Shadow novel, the 10th, first published in May 1932. "Hands in the Dark" is, I suppose, as good as anything. Which is more than I can say for this tale. Despite the title, there's not much to grab on to.

A number of the first year or so of Shadow novels are real slogs, and this is definitely one of them. It took a year or two for Gibson to hit his stride. He hadn't quite figured things out yet; his writing was wooden, and The Shadow was a more mysterious, elusive and omnipotent presence who didn't take center stage very often.

"Hands in the Dark," to compound matters, simply isn't a very good story. There is a minor code mystery, but the novel is painfully slow, with several chapters used at establishing bad guys murdering and impersonating in a plot to find a hidden cache of booty. There are some nice scenes involving The Shadow and a shady lawman and a decent shootout in the woods, but most of this is, frankly, dull, and the climax is a confusing endurance test.

Pyramid made this the fourth novel published in its Shadow reprint series, and I can't for the life of me understand why. It's not very impressive.

[M.H. Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

These Shadow books get better with each one! This is probably the 2nd best one I've read, just under "Crime Insured".

[Nathan Shumate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew of course that this wasn't going to be "good" by normative standards, but every once in a while you have to read a SHADOW novel which "Maxwell Grant" (Walter Gibson) churned out TWO PER MONTH, just to make you feel like a slacker as a writer.

[Jane Mercer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad at all, the mysterious Shadow hiding behind the scenes watching, waiting, letting the crooks make mistakes to dish out his own form of punishment. Datrd but still fun

[Todd Groeber · Rating 4 out of 5]

These old crime capers move so quickly. It’s interesting that The Shadow is already on to the villains of the story when it begins.

[James Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man named Reynold Barker is examining a piece of paper with a code on it. He's in a room belonging to the now-dead Theodore Galvin. As he looks at the paper, someone kills him.

Bob Galvin had lived in the house and is now there. The butler recounts how a supposed thief was found dead in a room in the house, probably dead two or three days before being discovered. Hiram Mallory is a friend of Bob's uncle. His uncle, Theodore Galvin, had died of disease elsewhere.

There is also a woman named Betty that Bob knows. Late that night Bob is going through some papers when a guy with a gun shows up in the room right behind where Bob is seated. The guy kidnaps him.

Betty talks about Bob not being like she thinks he should be. The butler says he's not the same as he was the previous night. Betty sees the Shadow in the study. She leaves to stay at a friend's house, and the man pretending to be Bob Galvin kills the butler.

Richard Harkness, architect, is confronted by two thugs who want to know of any hidden rooms in the mansion that was Galvin's. They end up killing the architect.

The Shadow knocks out the acting Inspector and checks a map that Harkness had drawn. Then the story talks about the Shadow's radio broadcasting and there's also a scene at his sanctum.

Betty gets back to the house early and ends up seeing the fake Bob and two men open the hidden room, but she's discovered in the process. She ends up imprisoned in the vault.

The Shadow rescues Betty and kills one of the crooks. There's a wild gunfight involving the Shadow in cab and a group of men attacking the stopped vehicle. The book then centers around Mallory's plans to kill the Shadow.

Chinatown makes an appearance, along with Wing Toy, a Tong leader. The trappers become the trappees, though, as the Shadow frees the real Bob Galvin. The offensive is switched to the side of the Shadow as the Shadow and Vincent get the real Galvin into his house.

Bob Maddox, the fake Bob Galvin, goes to see another man who might have information he can get. The crook kills the guy and gets the information he needs. Later, a group is in a building and they find the money that they have been looking for.

Suddenly, there's another criminal revealed, a criminal the Shadow knew about all along. The Shadow captures him and the two of them confront the one crook who escaped, Maddox. There's a furious gun battle and, in the end, all the evildoers have paid with their lives.

It's another really, really good Shadow novel.

[Johnny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walter Gibson, aka “Maxwell Grant,” the prolific author of novels and stories about the pulp era vigilante, The Shadow, for The Shadow Magazine revealed in a non-fiction book about the character and his ancillary appearances in radio and film that Orson Welles was not the actor who put in the most appearances as The Shadow. That shocked me because my first encounter with this hero was listening to scratchy recordings of Orson Welles playing the character over an AM radio station that faded in and out over the course of the broadcast. No, I wasn’t listening to the original shows in the ‘30s, but to a nightly replay of “Old-Time Radio” shows over a San Francisco station. Later, I was given many of the Orson Welles episodes on vinyl (and still have them to this day). So, it is no wonder that I mentally “hear” Welles’ voice whenever I read any of the adventures.

Hands in the Dark was pure pulp adventure. It had stereotypical villains whose only motivation was greed, more than one hidden room, a string of deaths, improbable cliffhanger endings to certain chapters, and secret codes. Add the costume and the cast of allies, the Shadow’s version of an adult red-headed league and the spice of a damsel in distress in order to create a marvelous casserole of “leaden harbingers of death” (Yes, that’s the metaphor for bullets on p. 169).

The novel gets its title from a scene where the Shadow is standing in a dark room, attempting to read a clue from the indentations left on the top page of a memo pad. Gibson (“Grant”) lavishes detail on the long fingers (p. 62), probably to be expected when a stage magician writes about his most successful protagonist. Yet, that isn’t the only place where the author “plays” with the dark. Characters find themselves in dark places and, at one point, one of the bad guys is completely engulfed by the Shadow’s cape. Several of the cliffhangers deal with confined spaces as if the author knew of the claustrophobia he seems to suggest.

It seemed as if the unveiling of the facts, the exposure of the mysteries, came extra late in the novel. But following the trail of the dead from upscale mansions through dark stereotypes of criminal Chinatown storefronts to hiding places within the heart of the finance district provides a chase worth following. Hands in the Dark seems to have been written in a hurry; it doesn’t have quite the glue and originality one expects from some of these adventures, but if you like pulp adventures as much as I do, it’s still worth reading.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hands in the Dark is a clever pulp novel featuring THE SHADOW. There is some clever crime stuff, some smart criminals, some intelligent detective work, etc. The Shadow, as ever, is mysterious and full of tricks and sneakiness. His penetrating eyes are fully and repetitively described, but this is not Shadow of the radio program. Oh, he appears really cleverly and mysteriously, but there are none of the mind tricks, and none of the clever sayings like "The Weed of Crime bears bitter fruit." There is a scene where he declares that he has known what was in the mind of the criminal gang all along, but other than that, I was a bit disappointed by his supernatural mental abilities or lack thereof.

There is a clever code message and when its reality is revealed I was impressed by its cleverness and how it fit into the plot. There is also several clues for the reader, one of which involves an area rug with the corner turned back. Really smart ideas that become entwined in this clever old pulp novel that brings me back to my childhood readings of Doc Savage, etc.

It won't be for everyone-- but should prove enjoyable for those who simply like yesteyear's pulp. This old paperback will get passed on.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story has a kernel of a good idea: the person you'd expect to be th protagonist is kidnapped and replaced by a lookalike impostor early on, and the people who would recognize him are either nearly blind or in on the deception. It's a trick that likely has been done better elsewhere (likely in the Shadow series as well), and honestly this story doesn't mine it for tension. The exchange is not subtly done, and the fact of it is revealed quickly, so the reader never starts questioning. Close attention does reveal the identity of a villain, a clever point that may or may not have been intentional.

The ultimate resolution of the mysterious cypher from the beginning of the book was an unexpected twist, but I'm not sure it all hangs together. The gangsters use letter replacement logic to try and break it, getting to the correct name, but then learn that the cypher means something entirely different. So it's a coincidence.

And of course the Shadow is always ten steps ahead, which is a little annoying.

[Joe]

This is my first Shadow novel and I really enjoyed it. I really like the way that the character is almost a creature of myth: less a detective and more a dark force of nature. The distance that the author keeps the Shadow heightens the suspense and creates an interesting story conceit where the mystery is told from the point of view of the killers. It's also an excellent example of classic thriller writing, where something interesting happens every chapter.

I would love to see a character like the Shadow reemerge. The character is written as a supernatural being and I could easily imagine him as a vampire. With urban fantasy being a big thing these days and with modern monsters being little more than humans with superpowers, it's nice to spend time with an inhuman, unstoppable force that actually feels otherworldly.

There are some examples of the odious racial attitudes of a different era, which can be troubling to current sensibilities and the structure at times degenerates into people explaining things to one another but otherwise I really liked this.

[Little Timmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to pulp heroes there are 2 or 3 great standouts and the Shadow is one of those. The stories are fast paced and action filled. The mystery just adds to the excitement. With his army of agents to help the Shadow never lets you down for a great read. Highly recommended

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great Shadow novel! My review.

[Murray Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a fun fast read enjoyed it want to read more of the shadow's books

[Ronald]

read some time in 1983