The Shadow 314 Model Murder

MODEL MURDER was originally published in the June-July 1947 issue of The Shadow Magazine. Model airplanes. Model boats. Model trains. Toy models. At the annual hobby and model show, murder strikes. Not once, but twice! Bruce Elliott wrote this story. OK, you can stop reading, now. You can stop reading the pulp novel, and you can stop reading this review. You know the pulp story is going to be a travesty upon the memory of The Shadow pulps, and you know this review is going to be a cruel one. I could say this Shadow novel is bad. I could say it's poorly written. I could say it's poorly constructed. I could say it's implausible to the extreme. I could say it's downright dumb. But I don't need to. I don't need to say any of those things. All I need to say is that it was written by Bruce Elliott. Nuff said... Still reading? OK, here goes. This was Bruce Elliott's ninth Shadow pulp mystery. And you'd think after doing eight others, he would have started honing his characterization of The Shadow and his cohorts. But no. He's still way off base. Gone is The Shadow's terse greeting to Burbank, "Report." Now it's, "Glad to catch you. I'm going to give you a list of names. I want you to check on all of them. Get right on it, will you?" Say, what?! And Moe Shrevnitz now speaks casually to his chief in a Brooklyn accent: "I thought ya wasn't gonna call on me. Wassamatter, don't ya love me no more?" Oh, brother! Give me a break! And for the curious, yes, The Shadow actually does appear in this story. That's always one of the first questions, when realizing that Bruce Elliott wrote it. Sadly, that was not always the case. But in this one, The Shadow appears a couple times, albeit briefly. The Shadow plays no part in the finale, however. The murderer is revealed in a scene straight out of a B-movie, in which all the suspects are gathered together in a room. It's Lamont Cranston, not The Shadow, who explains the murder step-by-step and unmasks the killer. In the good old days when Walter Gibson was writing The Shadow, the unmasked killer would have pulled out a gun and tried to escape, only to be withered in a hail of bullets. But in this tale, when unmasked, the killer covers his face with his hands and cries. Yes, that's how bad it gets! In case you're curious about the plot, the title is a bit misleading. There are no glamorous models, here. No artist's models, no runway models. We're talking about model toys. It all starts when Lamont Cranston needs a rest. Life has been too hectic and he has wanted to get away for a few hours. So he goes to the model builders' show for a little relaxation. But he doesn't get it, because at the strike of 4 PM, Don Darry is murdered under the mountain scenery of a railroad model. He's found with a chisel in his back. And within the hour, murder strikes again. This time in a gristly manner. In the machine shop adjoining the main display room, Ira Downs had an argument with a band saw and lost. His head was completely severed from his body. Not a pleasant way to go. Who is behind these two murders? One man, or two? And why were they killed? Cranston takes up the case and is up to his eyeballs in clues before you know it. Don Darry, the first victim, was a toy inventor. Did his latest toy, a voice-command robot, have anything to do with his death? Ira Downs was a machinist. Why did he commit suicide by band saw? Or did he? Is the murderer Harry Owen, a prominent toy manufacturer? Maybe young Bruce Bedrick, just out of the Army. How about Richard Brodder - pompous and pigeon breasted member of the hobby club's board of directors. Or the young kleptomaniac whose compulsion is to steal model trains. And then there's the reclusive millionaire John F. Murray, patron of the model club. Whew! It's enough to make the mind spin! Or make your stomach churn. And when it's all explained, and you've discovered how the second victim got his head cut off by a bandsaw, you'll scratch your head in puzzlement. The explanation makes no sense. I'm going to tell you how the story explains it, and I'm not even going to give you a "spoiler" warning. That's how little respect I have for this story. Elliott claims that the second victim was killed by bandsaw when he bent over to pick something up, and his neck somehow encountered the blade. He didn't hear the bandsaw running because of background noise. And he didn't see the blade moving because of a strobe light which made it appear stationary. He thought the saw was off. That's his explanation. Doesn't he think the guy would have pulled his neck back when he felt the searing pain of the blade cutting into his flesh? But no, the idiot kept pushing his neck into the bandsaw blade. Kept going until the saw had cut through this throat and neck bones, and the head was separated from the body, to roll on the floor. Talk about a ludicrous explanation! In this story, Commissioner Weston appears. No mention is made of Inspector Joe Cardona. Several other policemen show up and take up the slack of his absence, however. Burbank is in the story, but here he apparently works for a phone answering service. Moe Shrevnitz appears, but he's only referred to as "Shrevvie" and has acquired a Brooklynese accent. Hawkeye is mentioned once, only by name. Other than that, none of the normal characters from the stories appear. You see, it's just not the same... Oh yeah, and Lamont Cranston has a house in Manhattan. Not an apartment. Not a room at the club. A house. But no mention is made of his New Jersey mansion. All of Elliott's stories were shorter than what was normal for Shadow mysteries. This one is a shade under 25,000 words while most of Gibson's were well over 40,000 words. Originally, this tale was entitled "Deathly Still." For some reason, the editors at Street Smith changed it to "Model Murder." As if changing the name would help it. To paraphrase Shakespeare's line from Romeo and Juliet, "A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet." I'm confident that in the case of this stinking pile of garbage, he would have said, "This story by any other name would still smell!" There are some people in this world who like to say, "Look, I just shoved a railroad spike through my tongue." "Look, I just held my hand on a red-hot stovetop!" "Look, I just smashed my thumb with a sledgehammer!" Masochists, all of them. And to that group, I add those who would proudly proclaim, "Look, I just read a Bruce Elliott Shadow novel!" Only masochists or Shadow completists will want to read this story. The rest of you will want to run screaming from the room!