The Shadow 013 The Blackmail Ring

THE BLACKMAIL RING was originally published in the August 1, 1932 issue of The Shadow Magazine. An international group of blackmailers is out to wrest secrets from influential men... secrets that can be used for blackmail. And The Shadow is out to confront the sinister leaders behind the evil scheme. 

 

It's not often that we get to see The Shadow overseas. This isn't truly one of his international adventures, but it does start in Paris. So for at least the first chapter, we get to watch the "international" Shadow in action. Then the scene changes to the United States, where the story continues until the rousing climax. 

As the story opens, we find The Shadow in his suite at the Hotel Barzonne in Paris. The Shadow has just finished cleaning up some crime rings throughout Europe. We aren't given a lot of details, but a few hints surface. There has been an amazing murder case in Germany. It's an unsolved mystery. And in a separate incident, a body has been found floating in the Seine River. What no one knows is that the drowned man was the German murderer. His drowning had not been accidental; the fiend of crime had encountered just retribution from The Shadow! 

In London, two men had been discovered dead in a rundown rooming house, victims of a gun fray. And sixty-thousand pounds in English currency, stolen in a London bank robbery that had baffled Scotland Yard, had been mysteriously recovered following a tip from an unknown source. Little did anyone suspect that the two dead men had been responsible for the robbery. They had met their fate at the hands of The Shadow. 

 

Yes, The Shadow has been busy all over Europe. He's currently cleaning up the loose ends of another crime. An American named Herbert Brockley had been murdered. The Apache killers, the Parisian criminals responsible, had themselves been killed. But one of the gang escaped. One man, who had befriended Brockley, had been given secret documents by Brockley before his death. And these documents could be used for further blackmail. The Shadow must track down the man responsible and recover the documents! 

 

Back in the good old U.S., The Shadow has his agents watching wealthy men who are possible blackmail victims. And this is where me meet up with our proxy hero for this story, one Stuart Bruxton. As often happens in many of these stories, Bruxton accidentally stumbles into the situation. It's just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

He's driving to Herkimer, Maryland, when he picks up a hitchhiker. They take a "shortcut" and end up being mistaken for someone else. The hitchhiker is murdered and Bruxton is taken captive. When Bruxton is discovered to be someone other than who the cutthroats were expecting, he's tied up and left in a old country house that's set afire. Yes, it's all a series of unfortunate coincidences. 

And by another coincidence, The Shadow's faithful aide, Harry Vincent, just happens along at the right time, and sees the flames shooting above the roof of the house. He breaks in and rescues Bruxton. It seems that Bruxton was mistakenly identified as Wallace Powell, a courier carrying those stolen blackmail documents from Paris. When the gang in the old house discovered their prisoner wasn't Powell, he was deemed disposable. Vincent had been searching for Powell, and came along at exactly the right time to rescue Bruxton from the inferno. 

 

So exactly, what's going on here? Well, it seems that Herbert Brockley went to Europe to escape some unknown menace. There, he befriended an American confidence man named Wallace Powell. Brockley gave some documents to Powell. These facts were uncovered by Clyde Burke, another of The Shadow's agents, who had gone to Paris as a correspondent for his New York newspaper. 

 

These documents contained facts that could be used to blackmail someone in America. Powell brought the documents to the United States shortly before Brockley was killed. The Shadow avenged Brockley's death in Paris, then set out to track down Powell and the mysterious documents. 

So Wallace Powell is in America with the documents. He's trying to sell them. Someone is trying to kill him. And they struck against Stuart Bruxton by mistake. Harry Vincent helps Bruxton escape, but the bad guys are long gone. So Vincent convinces Bruxton to join him in trying to track them down. Bruxton will be safer working with him, and has a better chance of seeing his assailants captured, than if he goes to the police. 

 

Our proxy hero Stuart Bruxton, in the company of The Shadow's agent Harry Vincent, head off into adventure, seeking the loose threads of the American side of the blackmail gang. And returning to America to assist them when needed is The Shadow. 

 

This version of The Shadow is the early one, in which he only appears occasionally when needed. Most of the action is carried by our proxy hero Stuart Bruxton and The Shadow's faithful agent, Harry Vincent. The Shadow just stays in the background. But he's directing the investigation, passing out orders and collecting information. It's The Shadow who figures out the secret identities of the criminals, and brings them all to justice in a rousing climax. 

Other than Harry Vincent, the only agents we see are Rutledge Mann and Burbank. Burke is mentioned, but doesn't actually appear. Burbank's part is extremely small. I think he only gets two lines of dialogue. Mann's part is slightly larger, as he gets to interview Bruxton and deliver messages to that mysteriously empty "B Jonas" office. He also gets to visit the Cobalt Club, where he made his magazine debut only two issues earlier. 

There is no mention of the law in this story. The Shadow doesn't encounter any law enforcement officers in Paris, although a couple of Parisian detective are mentioned. None show up in America. There's no sign of Detective Joe Cardona or Commissioner Ralph Weston of the New York Police. The Shadow metes out his own brand of justice, and no further representatives of the law seem to be needed. 

This was the thirteenth Shadow pulp mystery published, so things had pretty well settled down by this time. All the familiar trappings are there. The Shadow wears his sable cloak and slouch hat. He wears his girasol ring, and we are told "there was no other like it in the world," something we learned much later wasn't true at all. And we get to visit the sanctum. 

The Shadow is a master of languages. He speaks perfect French, here. He's also a master of disguise. He appears as a dignified American with no name. Later he is a tall, silent, cold-faced man landing in America. And he even gets to disguise himself as one of the main suspects, although I won't spoil it for you by revealing the details. 

 

As was typical in many of the early Shadow pulp stories, it is acknowledged that The Shadow can be heard weekly over the radio on a national hook-up. The world knows the laugh of The Shadow, and all of gangdom understands its meaning. 

 

The Shadow also apparently has some unknown agent at radio station WNX working as an announcer, because he sends messages to his agents over the radio, hidden in seemingly innocent announcements. It's the old "emphasized words" trick that was often used in the early stories, but dropped after a couple years. 

 

Also mentioned in the early pulp novels, but then dropped, was the compact wireless sending set that Harry Vincent keeps hidden in the back of his coupe. Once again, Harry lifts an inner lid to disclose the secret radio set. He strings an aerial between two trees and starts clicking away at the sending key. Apparently this radio isn't sophisticated enough to send voice, so it's back to the old coded radio messages. Makes me wonder what happened to that television sending set that Vincent used back in the second story "Eyes of The Shadow." Perhaps a little continuity error, there? 

 

The Shadow uses a uniquely shaped card in this story. Here it's blank, but when held up to the light, it casts a strange shadow that bears a grotesque resemblance to the profile of the man. Pretty cool calling card, if you ask me! 

 

The Shadow's autogiro isn't mentioned this time, but The Shadow does get to pilot a plane. Not only does he fly back and forth from New York to Maryland several times, but he gets to engage the bad guys in an aerial battle at the climax of the story. He flies not just any passenger plane, so sirree. His plane carries a machine gun. And he uses it! 

 

This is a pretty exciting story from the early years of The Shadow. The title isn't very thrilling, but it belies a really excellent Shadow pulp mystery. Just ignore a few little loose ends that are never tied up (like our proxy hero Stuart Bruxton still wandering around, clueless and lost, in Virginia, after the story concludes in Maryland). Yeah, ignore those little trifling things, and revel in the pulpy goodness of another great Shadow mystery.