I enjoyed issue #3 of 'The Shadowed Circle' a great deal, even though I don't know its subject, the Shadow, as well as I know other pulp heroes, especially Doc Savage. It felt accessible to me almost at every point, with just one article digging deeper than I cared to go. This following issue works a level better, because every piece felt accessible and a few moved right into my wheelhouse.

The most obvious of those is a look by Daryl Morrisey at the times that Doc met the Shadow in the comic books. That I haven't read any of these didn't matter in the slightest. I know the characters well and everything made sense, even when it seems the folk writing the comics took, shall we say, more than a few liberties with the characters handed down to them from the pulps. I appreciated this glimpse into a world I know only from the periphery.

Less obvious is the piece by Tim King about B. Jonas, a name on a door on the third floor of some abandoned offices on 23rd Street in New York, a door that the Shadow used as a dead drop to get information to and from the agents who worked for him. I don't remember this at all, so this had every possibility of being one of those niche articles that went over my head. However, it's really historical detective work, because King tries to figure out whether that name on the door had an importance to writer Walter Gibson. It doesn't seem like a random name. Where did he get it? I'm a sucker for this sort of detective story and I loved this piece.

There's another piece of historical detective work here to close out the issue, though it has little need to dig deep. It's John Olsen's look at the final episode of the Shadow's radio show, which was broadcast on Boxing Day, 1954 but is now lost. What survives is the script, so Olsen re-creates the experience of listening to that show, right down to the commercials. The need here is less bookish research and more imagination, but Olsen delivers exactly what's needed.

Similarly, Will Murray's piece in this issue has him think back over all the questions that he didn't ask Gibson when they chatted, questions that he can't ask him now because he passed in 1985. It's a good piece with some good thinking behind it, but it resonated with me because I'm in the same boat with the writer I'm documenting, Guy N. Smith. It always felt like he would be there forever, so certain niggling questions always got put off. Now that he's passed, I can't throw them at Guy to see what the answers might be and that's a painful lost opportunity. I feel for Will, who lost a friend as well as a fount of knowledge, just as I did.

It's pure coincidence, of course, that there be four pieces here that resonate with me personally, but the reasons why they do are also reasons why these would be particularly accessible articles. I get that this is a zine dedicated to the Shadow, so readers kind of have to have some acquaintance with the character, but these pieces highlight that they don't have to be megafans. With a couple of issues behind me, I can unequivocally state that this works wonderfully for entry level Shadow fans and I expect that it would pretty well for the diehards too. That's good editing.

Case in point: the opening piece this time out is the first part of an article written by Dick Myers, a pulp fan of long-standing who wrote for the pulp zines back in the sixties and seventies. This piece was probably written around 1971 or 1972 but was never published, so this printing is quite a coup for Steve Donoso, who received the manuscript a couple of years ago, long after Myers passed. It's initially a little awkward, starting out formal and humourless, but the humour develops until I was grinning at some of his phrasing. It's a realistic but light-hearted look at how the Shadow financed his sprawling operations, poking holes with loving intent, tongue firmly planted in cheek.

That leaves two other pieces, the concluding part to Darby Kern's interview with Michael Uslan, an article I started reading in issue #3, and another comic book piece, with Todd D. Severin trawling a reliable way through the Shadow in Street & Smith comic books. He could easily have lost me here, but I kept with him throughout, as he outlined how the character grew differently in this medium, a different Shadow to the one in the pulps or the one on the radio, because each had an audience of their own to reach.

And so this is another solid issue of 'The Shadowed Circle', dated Fall/Winter 2022. Donoso aims at a three time a year publication schedule, so he's coming up on due for issue 5. When will it be out? I have no idea, but I do know who knows. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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