[The Shadow 317] • Ten Glass Eyes

TEN GLASS EYES was published in the December-January 1948 issue of The Shadow Magazine. To say this is the worst Shadow novel ever written is... well, dog-gone-it... pretty darn accurate. Bruce Elliott is well-known for writing the worst Shadow novels of the entire pulp run. And this is, arguably, the worse of the worst. How bad is it? Read on... This story is probably most famous for being Shadowless. It's a Shadow pulp novel without The Shadow. The Shadow doesn't appear. He isn't mentioned. There aren't even any hints of The Shadow. It's a murder mystery in which Lamont Cranston plays detective. And as a murder mystery it's fairly routine. Not bad. But not good, and certainly not what Shadow fans would be expecting. As the story opens, young Roger Stanton, barely twenty-eight, is on the run from the law. He has forged a check, signing his wealthy father's name to pay for gambling debts. His father has had enough of his irresponsible son's actions, and is pressing charges. There's a three-state alarm out for him and a thousand-dollar reward. Young Roger has adopted a new identity and now sports a mustache, colored glasses and a stooped walk. For the past two days, he has been followed. He can't seem to shake the stranger following him. No matter what he tries, the stranger keeps appearing. Roger Stanton has arrived in the small town of Custer. It's a strange city to him; he's never been here before. He flees from the man following him, enters a random tenement building and sneaks into an upstairs room. Once inside the door, he's slugged from behind. When he awakes, he finds himself lying on the floor of the dirty tenement kitchen, a bloody knife in his hand. And in the bedroom, a corpse! The dead man sits on a chair, a gristly knife wound in his stomach. From his hand, drops a glass eye. In shock, Roger Stanton picks up the glass eye and absent-mindedly places it in his pocket. The door opens, and in walks the man who has been trailing him. The man is... Lamont Cranston. Lamont Cranston has been hired by Mr. Stanton senior to keep an eye on his son and keep him safe. His job has been to follow young Stanton until he is ready to stop running, give up, come home and face the music. But now Roger has stumbled into murder. Murder which he will be accused of committing. And it's up to Lamont Cranston to prove him innocent. The only way to do that is to find the guilty party; to solve the murder for the police. The dead man was Albert Mingus, a loan shark. He was universally hated by everyone in town. That means Lamont Cranston has too many suspects. He must discover why Mingus was killed? Why did he remove his glass eye in his last dying moments? And who was the real murderer? So Lamont Cranston sets about to solve the crime. But he uses none of The Shadow's abilities of stealth or his great stamina. He doesn't stalk through the night in cloak of black. No, instead he goes to bed at night, tired! And in the end, he does solve the case. But without the excitement and action of a Shadow novel. What a let down! One or two isolated artifacts of The Shadow we all know do show up in the story. But they are brief, as if Bruce Elliott was throwing us a bone. Burbank is mentioned a couple of times as Cranston's "handyman." He doesn't actually show up in the story, however. Hawkeye does appear briefly, but is only there because Elliott needed someone to hide in a boat and record a conversation. That's all he gets to do. And Shrevvy (that's cabbie Moe Shrevnitz, to the purists) is just mentioned as not being there. No one else from the previous seventeen years of pulp stories is mentioned. How bleak! The Shadow... oops... Lamont Cranston, still carries a .45 caliber automatic. But now, it's just one -- not two. And he keeps it in a shoulder holster, not a pair of .45s holstered beneath his black cloak along with a second set of replacements. Being a post-war novel, brief mention of World War II is made. A throw-away comment is made about Roger Stanton not having been in the army because of a heart murmur. Probably to explain the weakness of character of young Stanton. Certainly a patriotic ex-GI wouldn't forge a check or flee from the law. The explanation for Stanton's indiscretions must lie in the fact that he didn't serve in the armed forces. The Lamont Cranston in this story seems to have some slight reputation as a detective. He comments at one point, "You may have seen my picture in the papers some time or other." And he has run into the local chief of police at a law-enforcement convention sometime previously. This Lamont Cranston certainly isn't the keen master of criminology we've come to associate with The Shadow. In one instance, we are told that "Cranston wasn't aware of how he got there, but Hawkeye was at his side." And that's just not right! No one could sneak up on The Shadow that we've all learned to know and love. Bruce Elliott portrays Cranston as just some average schmoe, not the amazing man of lightning reflexes and razor-sharp senses. So what's with the "ten glass eyes" of the story title? Well, the police are on the lookout for the dead man's missing glass eye, and Cranston, in an effort to throw them off the track, distributes ten glass eyes around town. Town citizens, reading about the case in the paper, find the glass eyes and turn them in to the police, confusing matters slightly. But it's all to no apparent purpose. The story wouldn't have changed, if that ploy had been deleted. But it did serve one purpose: to give this story a title. My advice: avoid this story like the plague! If you have an academic interest in seeing The Shadow at the lowest point in his entire three-hundred-twenty-five, nineteen-year pulp run, you might want to waste a few hours reading this short twenty-seven-thousand-word story. But waste it, you will. Don't say I didn't warn you.