[The Shadow 310] • Death on Ice

DEATH ON ICE was originally published in the December 1946 issue of The Shadow Magazine. Violent death, set high in the wintry mountains where vacationers revel, confronts The Shadow - as the weird Fool Killer stalks his helpless victims. Let's have a contest: the worst Shadow novel ever! And the winner is... well, not this story. Not quite. But darned close. This is one of those infamous Bruce Elliott stories. Walter Gibson set the gold standard for writing Shadow stories. Bruce Elliott set a different kind of standard. For two years, from 1946-1948, he was the only author writing Shadow mysteries. And setting a new low. This is one of those stories. It's bad. The only thing that keeps it from ranking as the absolute worst is that at least The Shadow appears in the tale. In some of Elliott's Shadow tales, The Shadow wasn't even mentioned. So while this story may be in the bottom one percent, there were several that were even worse. Believe it or not... Lamont Cranston is called out from his New York apartment to investigate a murder in the winter resort on Lake Violent in the Adirondack Mountains. Yes, you noticed that he no longer lives in his palatial New Jersey mansion. We're not told why; only that he lives in a small New York apartment. Just another sign of a Bruce Elliott story. Anyway, it seems that ski instructor Peter Gohan was shot. Shot in the middle of a ski jump, right in mid-air! So Cranston takes the train to the resort hotel, Chez de Silbis, nestled at the very tip of the snow covered mountain. There he meets Patricia Stone, a middle aged nurse and Miss Marple wannabe. Let's run down the cast of characters. In addition to Mrs. Stone, there's Steven Haight. He's a professor and academician interested in americana and folklore. Also, we meet Mr. Crispin, a fellow buff on american folklore. The two of them bicker endlessly over the source of a legendary figure known as the Fool Killer. Don't ask... it's boring, and has nothing to do with the story. It's just a time waster; a filler. Elaine Charris is a photographer's model, and is romantically involved with young Jerry Eliot. Jerry Eliot is a stereotypical newspaper man, a young go-getter who Cranston likes to explain things to. The same basic character appeared in several other of Bruce Elliott's stories, but he was given a slightly different name: Jerry Vale. No matter what you call him, he's a pal that Cranston can bounce ideas off of. Jim Thompson is the other ski instructor, naturally upset by the death of his friend Peter Gohan. The innkeepers are a husband-wife pair by the name of Mrs. and Mr. de Silbis; they are constantly bickering and making life miserable for each other. And finally, we meet Sheriff Bradley, a fat oaf who gives law enforcement a bad name. One of those characters is the killer. But wait! There's more. A corpse turns up inside a snowman; yes, standing frozen inside a layer of snow. It turns out to be the wife of Steven Haight, a lady who supposedly took the train back to New York weeks ago. So now we have two murders. And there's more to come! It's up to Lamont Cranston, along with two brief appearances by The Shadow, to solve the crimes and name the guilty party. Yes, The Shadow does appear in this story. And considering who wrote it, that's saying something positive. There were five authored by Bruce Elliott in which our hero never even made a single appearance. Those would definitely rank even lower than this story. So, The Shadow does show up -- twice. But it's not The Shadow that we have come to know. This Shadow is a tired Shadow. He wants to get the case over with, so he can go back and sit comfortably by the fire. He seeks a vacation from crime. Quite a far cry from the tireless super hero we've come to know from Walter Gibson's wonderful stories! Burbank makes a brief appearance by phone. And it's mentioned that Shrevvie (that's Moe Shrevnitz to the purists) is out of town visiting a sick relative. But none of the other agents appear or even are mentioned. Author Bruce Elliott seems to want to take a few pot shots at those hoity-toity slick magazines which rejected so many pulp authors. In one scene, he has a character say dismissively, "Slick magazines make their money from their ads. Pulps make it on the selling price of a dime or whatever." And later, trying to boost the reputation of pulp writers, "But never turn up your nose at the pulps. Lots of top writers started there." Unfortunately, Bruce Elliott wasn't one of them! He throws in slang that I doubt even readers of that time period understood. He has the reporter say, "The N.Y. Ledger and don't scream. I know it's a lousy paper, but I just got my ruptured duck and I wanna find out what makes with a paper before I go out on the limb." Puh-lease... give me a break! Then there's the scene where Cranston leaves the party so The Shadow can take over. Yes, people notice it, but they're too dense to put two-and-two together. Like when Elaine, the model, says, "Jerry, who do you think was in that second ice boat; the one that horrible laugh came from? And where is Mr. Cranston?" Sloppy writing. Sloppy... sloppy... sloppy! The story is short. It's just 28,000 words. But even at that, it's padded with a "pulp horror story" that a character reads aloud when the action slackens. All of chapter twelve is taken up with this story that is supposedly written by one of the suspects in the case. Without that filler, the story would have been under 25,000 words. The story isn't essential to the plot and could easily have been left out. In my mind, I can hear the editors at Street Smith saying, "Great story, Bruce, but we need 3,000 more words." "No problem," he replies, "I've got this story that's been rejected by all the pulps as filler for the back of their magazines, so I'll just throw it in here." "Genius!" they cry. Cheap padding, pure and simple. And I've padded this review too much, as well. So let's end it. Every Shadow completist will want to read this story, just so they can say they have read them all. Every other Shadow fan can safely skip this story, without missing anything. Unless you really love bad Shadow stories. And don't say I didn't warn you!