“The Living Shadow” (part thirteen)

We're in the home stretch. Which is...kind of disappointing, I guess. The stakes of the story are still just the Shadow wanting to get ahold of these jewels for purposes we don't know and have been given no reason to care about. We never got to know Laidlaw or any of his surviving family, assuming the Shadow isn't a relative of his, so there's no particular desire to see justice done.

That last bit is particularly galling, because murder mysteries are usually pretty good about giving you an emotional anchor for the case. Even just learning about the victim's life and relationships after the fact without ever seeing them alive is often enough. Or, if the victim was an asshole who had it coming, the investigation usually leads to a sympathetic (or at least entertaining) witness or perp whose fate hinges on the case. In this story, the murder is just an impersonal plot device, nothing more.

At the very least, most detective stories at least try to provide an intellectual puzzle to solve if nothing else. The Living Shadow is kiiind of doing that, I guess, but Harry Vincent's distance from the central investigation of the case de-emphasizes this aspect. The story's attention is all spent on Harry snooping around and dodging bad guys, not on him actually puzzling things out. The Shadow does that himself, mostly offscreen.

And sure, the Living Shadow isn't just a detective story. It's also a pulp adventure about an American everyman joining a vigilante secret society. But I don't find Harry Vincent nearly charismatic enough to carry that kind of story on his own (the book could be doing SO much more with his internal world, family connections, etc...), and none of the mysteries surrounding him are all that intriguing or inspiring to me. Except for "who even is the Shadow?" I guess, but the story ruins that by overhyping him so much that I can't help but resent his presence in it.

Basically, the book had most of its length to get me to start caring, but it didn't, and now we're approaching the end.

28. Vincent Searches​

Harry has a good, restful night's sleep in the Metrolite. His dreams are tormented by rocking sensations, as if of a speeding car, but he manages to get some good rest regardless. I will give the story credit for acknowledging post-trauma repercussions without taking it to histrionic extremes. More realistic in this way than a lot of contemporary pulp, which erred heavily in one direction or the other. The next morning he checks in with Fellows, and learns that he unfortunately won't be getting any more time off just yet. The Shadow wants him to locate Ezekiel Bingham, ASAP. And he has no leads for Harry to follow other than Bingham having left Holmwood two days ago. That's a bit of a tall order lol. Harry figures that he might as well knock on Bingham's door and ask that Jenks guy, and Fellows suggests that if he try that he should pretend to be an angry client asking why Bingham disappeared on him.

I suspect Jenks is going to need some combination of threats and bribery to make him spill, but maybe Harry can pull that off.

Fellows also tells Harry that the Shadow returned his car to the rental garage at Holmwood, and is pleased that Harry still has a car key on him. Also, this exchange happens:

““I’ll tell you. If you locate the missing lawyer you may find him in some distant place.”

”That’s right.”

”You will have to send word at once.”

”I can telephone to you.”

”That may be impossible. It may be necessary for you to stay close to watch Bingham. You may be in a place where a telephone is inaccessible.”

”I hadn’t thought of that.”

”That is why I asked you if you had the key to the back of the car. Should you discover Bingham, and be far from a telephone, unlock the back of the car, and you will find a box within.”

”What is the purpose of the box?”

”You will discover that if you need to communicate. Here is the key to the box. Use it only if necessary; do not open the box unless an emergency arises. A letter inside the box will explain its purpose.”

Is there a messenger pigeon in the box? Oh god I hope it's a messenger pigeon that would be amazing.

So, Harry takes the train back to Holmwood, picks up the car, and drives to Bingham's house. He kept his ears open for any relevant-sounding gossip on the train and at the hotel, but no dice. He feels weird approaching a house that he's already broken into to just knock at the door and act normal, which...well, this chapter has been doing better than most at making Harry relatable, but that's still not saying much. Anyway, he knocks, Jenks answers, and Harry asks a string of questions about how he can get in touch with Bingham, only for Jenks to reply to all of them with "he's not there," "he didn't tell me," and "I don't know."

An exchange that leads Harry to conclude thusly:

“Harry was convinced that Jenks had been telling the truth. It was obvious that the man had no idea where his employer might have gone.”

Um. Harry. Harry. Why? WHY are you convinced that Jenks is telling the truth? You didn't do anything to put his sincerity to the test. Hell, personally I find Jenks' overly terse answers and apparent eagerness to end the conversation to be fairly suspicious. But okay Harry, I'm not going to do your job for you.

After wandering morosely around the town trying to ask after Bingham for a few hours, Harry spots a kid clutching the spare tire on the back of his car as he drives back toward Holmwood Arms. He pulls over and grabs the kid, but the latter turns out to just be a poor outskirts boy who hitches rides on the backs of cars to get in and out of town instead of using buses he can't afford. Or so he says. It's entirely possible that the baddies are on to Harry, and this kid was paid to spy on him. Still, Harry decides to take him at face value and offers him a proper hitchhike to where he's going, for which he seems grateful. When they pass Bingham's house, the kid mentions the "old crabby guy who drives slow" that lives there. Due to Bingham's cautious driving habits, his car is a favorite of the kid's the ride the back of, even though he gets really mad and kinda scary when he catches him.

Harry sees an opportunity to do a little more probing, and he lucks out. A couple of days ago, the kid hitched a ride on Bingham's car and was surprised when he suddenly sped up outside of sight of the town and drove off in an unusual direction for him. The kid had to walk back a long ways to get home after managing to find an opportunity to dismount. Harry asks about the direction Bingham was going in that day, and the kid's answer suggests that he drove somewhere deeper into Long Island, toward Herkwell. That means that he's probably still somewhere on the island, unless he's relocated again since then. Or unless the kid is a plant, of course, but I don't think any of the players in this case would have reason to place such an elaborate contingency, so he's probably not.

Harry drops the kid off, and heads off on Bingham's trail. He's probably hoping to get to a phone before he has to waste his pigeon.


This chapter has a pigeon in it. I like that about this chapter.

Other than that? There were a couple of decent character moments for Harry, but still not enough. The thing with the kid was cute and colorful, but also just a little too fortuitous. This chapter was also much longer than the summary probably makes it seem, with a lot of multi-paragraph stretches describing innocuous details and mundane actions during travel from place to place that don't have much bearing on the story or characters, or even paint a vivid sensory picture. Too much filler.

29. English Johnny's Trip​

Our old friend Johnny English is still nursing his bruises from the other night, but he's not seriously injured. There's no explanation of how he and his thugs got their car back on the road, or if they did at all, but he got back home somehow I guess. After sleeping most of the morning, he's leaving to go meet up with Bingham, but recent events have made him justifiably paranoid about being followed. He notes an old man with a walking stick walking slowly up the street in front of his house, and is sure he saw the same old man walking around the same stretch of street an hour ago. Suspicious, but not sure enough to do anything about it, Johnny hails a cab and takes it to a random address, where he gets out and then waves down another cab.

He's made sure that the first one he caught from his own neighborhood wasn't a plant. But, he knows that that won't have stopped someone in another vehicle from tailing him. And, paying attention, he notes that his cab is in fact being followed by another car.

He tells the driver to let him off at a drugstore he knows the owner of, and then spends ten minutes chatting with the drugstore owner and waits for the shop to get busy before using the crowd to slip back out and sneak over to the subway station. Johnny is still the best written character in this story. Just by describing his toolkit in use like this, the author really conveys the "man of the city" vibe, and continues to set Johnny up as both a worthy opponent and an aspirational figure for our (unfortunately) much less charismatic protagonist. He gets off the subway, takes an elevator to the fifteenth floor of an office building, and then hastily gets back in it and goes to a different floor before taking the stairs out once everyone who was in the elevator with him has gotten out too.

This proceeds for some time, but no matter what he does, Johnny feels like someone is still on his tail. He thinks back to the rumors he heard about the Shadow. According to some criminal urban legends on the subject, the Shadow's voice has been identified on the airwaves, and infiltration of the broadcast stations discovered a hidden bat cave in one of them. However, these stories are all nonspecific enough to be made up, or at least very heavily distorted from any kernel of truth. The other Shadow stories Johnny has heard are more like the incident he experienced himself, with the almost-but-not-quite undetectable home intruder he had to deal with.

...

So, I did a little bit of reading, and the origins of the Shadow character are a bit more complicated than I thought.

Originally, the Shadow was just a narrator for the 1930 radio program "Detective Story Hour." He was literally just a narrator, think Rod Serling's role in "The Twilight Zone," not really a character in the world of the stories. "The Living Shadow" was written in large part as an advertisement for the radio show, turning the narrator into a central character of his own series in the process.

So, everything that English Johnny is musing about the radio broadcast station lair has tie-ins with actual radio programming from that station. The program that the Shadow used to send Harry his secret orders earlier on was, of course, also real, from the same network. That's why that scene made so little sense; it was literally ham-fisted product placement.

The better known Shadow-focused radio series, with the memetic "who knows what evil..." line, came long after this, when the Shadow was established as a character via this multimedia franchise.

So, that's why there's all these details connecting the Shadow to radio programming in this story. And why a lot of these details feel really forced and like they don't quite gel.

...

Anyway, Johnny English does some more slippery public transportation stuff, and then heads to the airport. A guy with a private monoplane owes him one, so he flies him out on short notice. It's not clear if Johnny was planning to do this from the beginning, but I think not. If so, there'd have been little point in being so careful to shake off pursuers, since a small, unscheduled airplane is pretty hard to track. So, probably a last minute stroke of inspiration.

In a last-paragraph POV shift, it turns out that the Shadow has somehow managed to track Johnny all this way. He's stuck watching the plane take off now, but he's confident (not sure why, given Harry's decidedly mixed performance so far...) that Harry will manage to track Bingham to the meeting place from the other side. Still, it's nice to see the Shadow fail at things every once in a while. If nothing else, it makes it seem like Harry might actually matter a little bit.

...then again, I'm still not sure why the Shadow doesn't just scope out Wang Fu's place and then take the jewels by force when they get there. So, Harry's necessity is still ultimately pretty questionable. Still, better than nothing I guess.


That's a post. Just like last time, English Johnny was much more entertaining to read about than Harry Vincent. And, like I said, the Shadow actually having to take the L once in a while makes me hate him slightly less.