Walter B. Gibson; Novelist Created ‘Shadow’ of Radio Mystery Programs

Walter B. Gibson, a magician and pulp novel writer who created the mysterious crime crusader “The Shadow,” died Friday at at a Kingston, N.Y., hospital. He was 88.

He wrote 283 “Shadow” stories under the pen name “Maxwell Grant” during the height of the popularity of pulp novels and the Street & Smith magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. The character first went on radio in 1930 with Jack LaCurto as the original Shadow. But it was not until 1937, when Orson Welles first asked on the air “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows” that the show became a national sensation.

Gibson was a consultant for the radio broadcasts but did not write any of the radio scripts that featured:

“The Shadow, Lamont Cranston, a man of wealth, a student of science and a master of other people’s minds, (who) devotes his life to righting wrongs, protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty.”

In addition to his fiction, Gibson also wrote a biography of magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, whom Gibson knew. A former journalist, Gibson wrote more than 100 books outside the “Shadow” series.