 | #048 "Gray Fist"
Vol. 8, No. 6 Published: 02/15/34 Submitted: 04/21/33 under the same title Author: Walter Gibson Review date: Apr 27, 2001 |
GRAY FIST was originally published in the February 15, 1934 issue of The Shadow Magazine. And ooooh, what a nasty guy this Gray Fist is! He's taken over the underworld; he's taken over the financial world; and now he's trying to take over The Shadow!
Only twice in the history of The Shadow has his secret headquarters, the black-walled sanctum, been discovered by an arch-villain. This is the first of those two stories. The other was in CRIME, INSURED published three years later.
It all comes about when Snakes Blakey, a shifty hoodlum, spies Cliff Marsland making a phone call to Burbank. He takes notice of the number, and reports it to Gray Fist. That's all that the evil Gray Fist needs. He traces the phone number and invades Burbank's secret room, not far from The Shadow's sanctum. Then he follows the special phone wire to The Shadow's sanctum itself!
Later, when The Shadow enters his sanctum, he feels something is amiss. He turns on all the lights - a rarity, since usually only a single blue light glows in the otherwise blackened sanctum. There, in The Shadow's secret abode, is the corpse of a murdered man, left by Gray Fist!
Gray Fist had left the dead man as a warning. He hadn't tried to seek out the secret files of The Shadow. From what this story tells us, it's a good thing he didn't! Apparently, The Shadow had been routinely booby-trapping his secret headquarters. There were hidden mechanical devices that would have set off explosions of enormous power, had the invader sought too deeply into the secrets of The Shadow's grim abode!
In this story, we see the first appearance of Yat Soon, the arbitrator of Chinatown. Yat Soon was above the tongs, the mysterious secret societies that ruled Chinatown. The leaders of the tongs obeyed him. He later appeared in other Shadow stories, including THE RIBBON CLUES the following year. He plays a vital role in this story, although I won't spoil it by revealing his role.
So here we have one of the best of The Shadow's early tales.