I've reviewed the previous three issues of 'The Shadowed Circle', which have concentrated rather generally on the pulp character known as the Shadow and I've enjoyed all three. However, how much I've enjoyed them has often come down to individual articles. This one may have fascinated me because it speaks to a topic I'm highly familiar with, often a Doc Savage tie-in, or because it's immediately accessible even if not, such as a historical look at origins. That one, on the other hand, may have lost me a little, because it's more specialised piece and I have little knowledge of its topic. And that's fine and very much what I'd expect from a general zine.

What's odd is that, continuing that logic, issue #6 ought to be my least favourite issue but I'm pretty sure it's actually my favourite. That's because it has a much tighter theme than just the Shadow himself, focusing in on a supporting character in the series and not even one that I recognise from the radio show, like Margot Lane. It's Myra Reldon, an American undercover agent as capable as the Shadow himself who was born in China and tends to work undercover in Chinatown under the alias of Ming Dwan. I hadn't heard of Reldon until the pitch for articles in the previous issue of 'The Shadowed Circle', so was interested to see how this would play to me.

It played very well indeed. Sure, there's some overlap between articles, down to repeat quotes, as a different set of writers tackle Reldon from different angles, but that's a good thing, I think. Each of them has their own take on her character and her value and each of them brings something new to their respective articles, even Anthony Tollin, who as the publisher of Sanctum Books valuably brought so many pulp stories back into print, but whose reprint here from one of them is the shortest piece anywhere in the zine and oddly placed after all the others. It's a solid introduction to the character and would have been better placed kicking off the issue.

Fortunately, not knowing the character, I do at least know the backdrop from which she was plucked, namely a genre little known today called "yellow peril" because it's rather out of political favour. It's best known in Sax Rohmer's infamous character Fu Manchu, a supervillain from the mysterious Orient dedicated to taking over the world, but many authors worked in yellow peril across many mediums. I'd have liked a piece that provided a background to the genre, Donoso's own article, 'Myra Reldon, the Yellow Peril and the Black Dragon' clearly more interested in the historical backdrop to the genre than the genre itself, but that's valuable too.

In fact, it's Donoso's piece and Tim King's 'The Shadow's Greatest Female Agent' that shone brightest for me. The former covered many details I knew about, like the Japanese concentration camps but also some I didn't, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese immigrants from becoming American citizens for over sixty years. While Donoso looks at the broader backdrop behind yellow peril and how the enemy had shifted over time from the Chinese to the Japanese, King focuses in on a set of fascinating individuals that he suggests series writer Walter Gibson may have based Myra Reldon on and why.

While King is mostly focused on how Gibson came up with Reldon's character, he also has an associated reason to take that approach, namely to underline how, from documented examples, it was actually believable that a Caucasian American woman could pass for Chinese to Chinese people in an American Chinatown.

We discover in the very first article, Arthur Penteado's 'Charming Dragons', that the Shadow first encounters Reldon as a charming American secretary, only for her to transform into the alluringly cruel Ming Dwan and sneak off into Chinatown to meet with members of a secret society known as the Jeho Fan. Malcolm Deeley's 'Myra Reldon in 'The Death of Margo Lane'' talks up her actual transformation, a memorable scene brought up more than once in this book, and it's fair for King to explain why that's believable and for Donoso to cover how it isn't yellowface, a dire practice I know very well from reviewing silent and golden era movies.

This commonality of thinking may be what surprised me the most with this zine. Even as these various writers differed on details and nuanced, they also share a substantial commonality of belief. Myra Reldon was a very important character in the Shadow series, they agree, not merely his first female agent but the first agent of either gender to match him in ability. She had much promise in these yellow peril years, but she faded away in unfortunate fashion, her potential minimised by the rise of Margot Lane on 'The Shadow' radio show, which in turn, prompted the introduction of Margo Lane (without the T) into the pulp to steal much of her thunder. It's relatively clear from these articles that Gibson wasn't happy about that, clearly favouring Reldon, but times were changing and so was the genre.

There's much more here than just what I've mentioned, including a piece by a pulp expert as highly regarded as Will Murray, who looks at the Shadow's exploits in Chinatown a little more generally than just those stories which featured Reldon as Dwan. This was another fascinating article for me, because it works well for fans of 'The Shadow' specifically but just as well for more general pulp fans and also those who enjoy that particular era of history. I was flabbergasted by a revelation that editor John Nanovic banned gunfights and car chases from 'Nick Carter', on the basis that they weren't time appropriate for a Victorian character and, after sales dropped, chose to eliminate women and girls from multiple titles, including 'The Shadow', from 1933. Change in power in 1936 meant that new blood ditched that rule and, all of a sudden, Myra Reldon shows up.

I've talked about my favourite articles in this issue but I don't really have a least favourite. Some certainly do less than others, but that's only because they're mining the same ground as all the others before them, with a little new to distinguish them. And that means, that even though I didn't know anything about Myra Reldon and Ming Dwan before reading this zine, I'm now absolutely for the idea of focusing entire issues as narrowly as this one. 'The Shadowed Circle' is only on issue #6, but it's already essential reading for pulp fans. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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