The Living Shadow

The Shadow - April 1931 First Issue thumbnail
The Shadow Magazine April 1931 thumbnail
La Sombra 1936 April thumbnail
The Thrill Book - October 1st, 1919 thumbnail
The Thrill Book v03n01 (10-01-1919) 002 thumbnail
The Shadow - April 1931 First Issue
The Shadow Magazine April 1931
La Sombra 1936 April
The Thrill Book - October 1st, 1919
The Thrill Book v03n01 (10-01-1919) 002

This was the debut issue of The Shadow Magazine. The Shadow began in 1930 as the host/narrator of a Radio Drama anthology series, introducing stories adapted from the Street & Smith pulp magazine Detective Story. Announcer Frank Readick buried himself in the role, chilling the airwaves with his haunting laughter. Intrigued, magazine buyers began asking for “that Shadow magazine.” Not ones to pass up a profit opportunity, Street & Smith commissioned magician turned writer Walter Gibson to create the first story for their new magazine starring and named for the mysterious Shadow.

This novel, The Living Shadow, originally had no Chinese characters involved. However, Street and Smith, trying to get this first issue published as soon as possible (to capitalize on the popularity of the radio character) but also hoping to contain any possible damage should The Shadow Magazine be a failure out of the gate, recycled a Modest Stein cover from the October 1, 1919 issue of the The Thrill Book, which showed a Chinese man cowering from a menacing shadow. Walter Gibson, once he was aware of the intended cover, had to quickly rewrite his story to include a Chinese connection.

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It’s Raining More Corpses in Chinatown

It's Raining More Corpses in Chinatown

A 2001 compilation of classic Yellow Peril stories.

Remember Fu Manchu?

With his army of Dacoit footpads, trained killer apes and poisonous creepy-crawlies, Sax Rohmer’s maleficent Devil Doctor held the reading world in thrall for half a century.

Fu Manchu’s glory years were the twenties and thirties–that fascinating interval between the two Great Wars. Innocence and ignorance weren’t mortal sins then. It was a smaller world, less complex, when houses had attics full of memories and old books, where you could sit and thrill to Tales of Chinatown and The Yellow Claw.

If the world view these fictions portrayed was simplistic and even jingoistic, it was a factor that seldom bothered homebodies of the Great Depression. For them, such remote and unglimpsed locations as China, the South Seas, India, and the jungled lands of Africa and South America existed as mere backdrops to tales of vicarious adventure.

This was the circumscribed world in which so-called Yellow Peril fiction thrived. The Chinese, or “Chinamen” as most Americans called them, had come to the New World as coolies to supply cheap labor for mining camps and railroads. By the 1870’s Asian ghettoized communities emerged in the heart of several cities: claustrophobic shadow worlds of serpentine streets and narrow alleys, soon identified as Chinatowns. While Westerners may have admired Chinese culture and tradition from a distance, our press chose to emphasize the most superficial and sensational aspects of Chinese life up close. Stories of bloody tong wars, opium smuggling, white slavery, hatchetmen, and gambling dens appeared frequently in luridly inventive newspaper accounts. The incorporation of these lip-smacking elements into the stew of pulp fiction proved irresistible.

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