Customer Reviews

City of Crime and Shadow Over Alcatraz (Shadow (Nostalgia Ventures))

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Nostalgia Ventures and Anthony Tollin have teamed up to do a comprehensive reprint of several Street & Smith pulp heroes. At present, they are doing double reprints of The Shadow and Doc Savage. Shortly, they will start new series reprinting The Avenger and The Whisperer. All have complete pulp texts (no edits or removals, like past reprints), tho reset so its easier to read, the original illustrations, reprinted covers (one is used as the cover of the book, but both original pulp covers are shown on the back), and several additional articles and extras.

Hopefully, they can succeed to reprinting all these characters in these new editions, they are all excellent.

With The Shadow having over 325 pulp novels, only a few reprinted, for the most part they are avoiding those that have been reprinted. They do try to pick two that more or less 'go together' in terms of a common theme.

With this book, #16, we have "City of Crime" (Oct 1, 1936) and "Shadow Over Alcatraz" (Dec 1, 1938). The common theme of these is crime conspiracies. The cover of "City of Crime" is the cover of this volume, and the original pulp covers of both are shown on the back.

"City of Crime" is an unusual story of the Shadow fighting crime in a corrupt city. He uses a variety of indentities, and in this story, they portrait corrupt police & politians. This was an attempt at doing a different type of Shadow story.

"Shadow Over Alcatraz" pits the Shadow, in his real identity of Kent Allard, against a superfoe known as Zanigew, which climaxs at Alcatraz. Zanigew may have been an attempt at creating a 'Moriarty' for The Shadow.

As extras in this issue are:

A forward by Edd Cartier, original interior artist on The Shadow, who replaced Tom Lovell.
An Interlude by pulp historian Will Murray, explaining the genesis of these two stories.
A short article on cover artist George Rozen's departure from The Shadow, by series editor Anthony Tollin.
A brief bio on Gibson.