[The Shadow 183] • Castle of Crime

CASTLE OF CRIME was originally published in the October 1, 1939 issue of The Shadow Magazine. It's a wartime story, filled with spies and shiploads of gold traveling the high seas. And at the center of the spy ring, the location of the hijacked gold is a castle sitting high on a Maine coastal cliffside. Windward Castle, a luxurious headquarters once owned by a millionaire but now lone and long-forgotten, it's now being used for nefarious purposes. A castle filled not only with millions of dollars of stolen gold, but with crooks, spies, and the sinister mastermind behind the entire plot. This story was written nearly a year before it was published. Written in November of 1938, war had broken out in Europe. Austria and Czechoslovakia had been invaded. America had yet to enter the conflict, but the subject was ripe for many pulp novels. That included The Shadow! It all starts when young Bob Osden finds Carl Sigmar dead, and evidence in Sigmar's wallet points to him being an international spy. Young Osden, son of a wealthy midwest merchant, had gone to pay off a gambling debt owned to Carl Sigmar when he found the body. Also found in Sigmar's wallet is a card for a Miss Gwendolyn Marcy. Bob suspects she's another spy; an associate of Sigmar's. Young Bob Osden is confused by all this spy business; he doesn't know what to do. At that moment, The Shadow enters the picture. Coming silently through an open window, The Shadow confronts Bob and rapidly wrings a confession out of him. Bob tells all; not that there's much he knows. To keep him out of the hands of the approaching police, The Shadow sends him out the window to safety while The Shadow leads the police away on a useless chase. That's where young Bob Osden meets Janet Barden, a young lady with whom he is immediately smitten. Janet is a plucky young thing who's searching for her missing uncle, the inventor Christopher Barden. Until recently, old Barden was working near the Canadian border on some secret experiments regarding coastal defense. But now Barden has disappeared and his young niece is seeking his whereabouts. Janet Barden's first lead to her missing uncle was the recently deceased Carl Sigmar. From there, the trail led to young Bob Osden. From him, she picks up a lead to the mysterious Miss Gwendolyn Marcy. She visits Miss Marcy, and gets another lead, this time to the master spy Fernand Zelta. Is this the man she seeks? Is he the head of the spy ring that has kidnapped her uncle? Is he the one who is using her uncle's inventions to sink gold-carrying ships? Yes, ships are going down in the Atlantic, struck by torpedoes from invisible submarines. And not just any ships. These ships are carrying gold. Gold that is removed quickly as the ships sink. Gold being spirited away to a secret location deep beneath the castle of crime! First was the sinking of the Finnish ship Lentura. A half million dollars in gold was removed from the ship before it sank. Then the Dutch freighter Marmaduke was struck by the same ghost submarine, and its cargo of a quarter million in gold was also taken. Third in line is the steamship Medea which carries five million in gold. Will it too be lost? Is there nothing that can stop this mystery sub? Can no one find the location of the stolen gold? Is there no way to defeat the master spy known as Zelta? Into the fray comes The Shadow with his agents Cliff Marsland, Moe Shrevnitz, Hawkeye, Jericho Druke, Miles Crofton and Harry Vincent. Assisting from the long arm of the law is Inspector Joe Cardona and detective sergeant Markham. From the government, they are joined by federal agent Vic Marquette and foreign affairs committee member Senator Ross Releston. And let's not forget amateurs Bob Osden and Janet Barden, who take the part of proxy hero and heroine in this story. It's quite a crowd; all working together to defeat the powers of evil. Some interesting references in this story are to the New York World's Fair. The fair is mentioned several times in this story, including a rumor that a ghost vessel had appeared in Long Island sound and had opened a bombardment on the World's Fair. Walter Gibson tells us that people were confusing the submarine story with a fantastic radio program, wherein men from the moon came down to the earth in gigantic capsules. This "fantastic radio program" sounds suspiciously similar to the real-life broadcast of Orson Welles' "War of the World's" that frightened all of America just weeks before Gibson wrote this story. Certainly not a coincidence... A few other points of interest. As we know from other pulp stories, The Shadow speaks many languages. In this one, The Shadow is said to understand the Malaysian language. Chalk up another one on the old linguistic belt. It's also mentioned that The Shadow has a short-wave receiving station of his own somewhere near New York, managed by Burbank. That was also mentioned in several of the other early Shadow novels, but seemed to disappear in later stories. Here's a curious one that I don't know. Walter Gibson claims in this story that inhabitants of Java react to opium differently than others. To quote: "For centuries, the use of opium had never deviated in its result, so far as inhabitants of Java were concerned. It invariably turned them into 'muck runners,' insane fanatics, pressed with the sole desire to run at large and slay everyone in sight." I've never heard the term "muck runners" before, nor have I heard that Javanese turned into insane fanatics when using opium. Does anyone know if this has any basis in fact? Or is it just pulp fiction? One final note of interest. What should happen if The Shadow should be killed? What would happen to his organization? Would it go on, or disband? This story tells us that long ago, The Shadow's agents had sworn that should death overtake their chief, they would carry on his cause against crime. They were so committed to their oath of allegiance that all would have welcomed suicide, if it would mean the culmination of some task that The Shadow's could no longer perform. Now that's some oath of allegiance! It's quite a story that will thrill you on every page. Spies! Gun-battles! Gold! Mystery submarines! Sinking ships! Damsels in distress! Young love! Death traps! Castles! Secret passages! The Shadow's autogiro! And The Shadow himself, in his top form, battling the forces that would destroy America! Whew!