Q. Who was The Shadow?

A. Street and Smith was in an enviable, but awkward position in the early 1930s. Readers were clamoring for the magazine featuring The Shadow; but, Street and Smith didn't have such a magazine.

As a means of promoting its Detective Story Magazine, the publishing house had sponsored a radio program that dramatized stories from the magazine. The program was hosted by a mysterious announcer with a haunting laugh. The announcer went by the name of The Shadow.

Street and Smith scrambled to satisfy the readers' appetites, hiring writer and magician Walter Gibson to flush out The Shadow character. A quarterly magazine titled The Shadow hit the stands with an April 1931 date. Its instant success prompted Street and Smith to increase its publication rate to monthly.

By giving the magazine the same name as its featured character, Street and Smith unknowingly started a genre that would prove to be a goldmine over the next decade: the character pulp.

Gibson's Shadow was a cunning master of the night, able to melt into the shadows and strike fear into the hearts of criminals with his whispered, mocking laugh. When not cloaked in black slouch hat and coat, The Shadow posed in a variety of identities, including that of wealthy playboy Lamont Cranston. The Shadow was helped by a cadre of agents, all of whom owed their lives and their allegiance to him.

Together they battled a range of evildoers – from common swindlers and jewel thieves to the band of The Hand and the voodoo master Rodil Mocquino – for 18 years, until the summer of 1949, and for 325 novels.

Readers knew little about The Shadow at first, but as the series progressed readers were given hints about his past. In 1937, the story "The Shadow Unmasks" revealed just who The Shadow really was. He was Kent Allard, a famed aviator who had disappeared years before in Central America. Allard had been a flying ace and spy during World War I, before starting his war against crime.

Also in 1937, six years after The Shadow first appeared in print, he returned to the airwaves with a drama of his own. But unlike the print Shadow who relied on darkness and his stealthy abilities to conceal him from others, the radio's Shadow used an hypnotic power he learned in the Far East. One thing that the print Shadow did pick up from the radio program was a female agent named Margo Lane.