In 1930, Street & Smith broadcast a radio show, in which an announcer would read from the latest issue of Detective Story Magazine. Harry Charlot, a writer for the show, decided to give the anonymous host of the program a nom de plume -- The Shadow. Announcer James LaCurto would start each program with a hammy laugh, and in a creepy voice, he would end each segment with the trademark line, "The Shadow knows!"

The new format became a big hit with listeners, who asked their newsellers for "the magazine with that Shadow guy." No such magazine existed, but Street & Smith editor Henry Ralston decided to take advantage of the character's popularity. He hired William Gibson, a stage magician and journalist, to write the first story for The Shadow Magazine. It turned out to be a big hit, and Gibson was the ideal writer for the job. He went on to write 283 Shadow novels, and his character -- a mysterious, dark robed, hawk-nosed avenger, a master of disguise and an expert with a pair of .45 automatics -- became the model for a host of other pulp heroes.

Dozens of characters were created in most or less the Shadow's mold -- such as the Phantom Detective, Secret Agent X, the Ghost, the Black Bat, Captain Zero and countless others. Two of them stand out. The Doc Savage stories, written by an inventive telegraph operator named Lester Dent, were about a super-athlete and scientific wizard named Clark Savage, who toured the world and fought evildoers with his five eccentric buddies. ("Ham" Brooks, the swell-dressed, Harvard-trained lawyer, and his ape-like pal, the brilliant chemist "Monk" Mayfair, were Doc's most popular sidekicks.) Doc Savage magazine was characterized by both a keen imagination and a quirky sense of humor, as Doc would travel to the four corners of the Earth, battling bizarre villains with a seemingly never-ending supply of wondrous gadgets.

The Spider stories, on the other hand, were about a costumed vigilante named Richard Wentworth, who shot criminals and left the mark of a spider on their cooling corpses. The Spider was obviously inspired by the Shadow, but the Spider's adventures put him in a class of his own. While the Shadow's adventures tended to be cerebral and bloodless, and the Shadow was something of an ambiguous, inhuman character, the Spider's saga were distinguished by a driving narrative style and over-the-top melodrama. The Spider's enemies were probably the most vicious and bloodthirsty in the hero pulps, while Wentworth and his mistress, the lovely Rita Van Sloan, were shot at, captured, tortured, and faced arrest and execution in almost every episode.

By the time of Pearl Harbor, the hero pulps had lost their old exuberance. The Spider folded; The Shadow became repetitive and tedious; Doc Savage became a more sedate and realistic hero. Comic book heroes, like Superman and Captain America, offered simpler, more fantastic fare, better suited to a juvenile audience. The hero pulps, like the pulps in general, were facing the end of the line.

Bibliography

For many fans, the hero pulps are pulp fiction. The latest book on the Hero Pulps, Don Hutchinson's The Pulp Heroes, is a good a place to begin (I believe it's still in print). Books on individual heroes can also be found: check out The Shadow Scrapbook and The Duende History of the Shadow; Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life by Phillip Jose Farmer; and The Spider, by the late Robert Sampson. Finally, if you're interested in radio shows, The Great Radio Heroes, by Jim Harmon, offers a good survey.

Other Sites

Many people can tell you more about the hero pulps than I could ever attempt to do here. A few good sources include the following:

• The Hero Pulps -- Chris Kalb's cool page on the hero pulps.
• alt.pulp FAQ -- Plenty of information on the Hero Pulps, such as Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, and other masked men.
• There are pages of links, devoted to the Hero Pulps, which include Greg Swan's hero pulp literature homepage,  The Pulps Doc Savage, The Shadow, and more, Pulp Magazine Heroes, Steve's Mystical Realm and Pulp Links!!
• The Doc Savage Web Ring -- There are several sites devoted to Doc Savage. Here's a few of them, including The 86th Floor and Doc Savage Unchained, among others.
• The Shadow's Sanctum-- Complete with hammy laugh, for those of you with audio capability.
• The Shadow Pulps -- Here's another site devoted to the famous pulp superhero.
• Here's a site devoted to The Avenger.
• Pulp Bibliographies -- Rutgers provided this useful bibliography for a variety of hero pulps.
• The Secret Sanctum -- A site devoted to contemporary pulp fiction.
• Lester Dent's Master Fiction Plot -- Read the plot formula that Lester Dent used for his Doc Savage stories.
• If you're looking for information on old-time radio, the home of The Shadow, you can turn to Past Times Nostalgia Entertainment -- Links to Our Favorite Vintage Radio Sites.  You can also turn to the Old-Time Radio Page, to Radio Days, to the Radio Showcase Online Catalogue.
• You can also read more about the movie serials of the 1930's -- frequently inspired by the pulp superheroes -- at Cliffhanger Classics, Cliffhangers: The Movie Serials of Yesteryear, and The Serial Squadron.

Many thanks to Chris Kalb for providing the cover graphic for this page.