“The Living Shadow” (part ten)

Back to the Shadow! By the end of this post, we'll be a little over two thirds done with "The Living Shadow," and frankly...at this point I'm really not optimistic. The book did have a high point in its second quarter or so, with the Long Island stay that let Harry be proactive in a believable way and explore a bit of his character, so it could potentially have others going forward. But, it's kind of running out of space to redeem itself as a whole at this point.

Anyway, triad underboss Wang Fu has just had a friendly meeting with a criminal go-between named Johnny., which the Shadow spied on using one of his improbable disguises. After leaving the tea shop, Johnny hailed a cab, which - unbeknownst to him - is being driven by Harry Vincent. Let's see what the Shadow is going to have him do with this passenger, if not just track his destination.

22. Fresh Trouble​

Johnny gets into the cab and gives Harry an address. It takes a while, since Harry isn't actually a cab driver and hasn't had a chance to familiarize himself with the streets as well as an actual cabbie would be now. This might have ultimately worked out in his favor, though, because Johnny apparently has a tendency to think out loud quite a lot. Which is...not really a good trait to have for a mob courier, but I guess no one ever said that Bingham and Fu were right to put their trust in this clown, so.

““Might as well let them know I’m in town,” he muttered to himself. “Now that I’ve fixed things with Wang Foo, there’s nothing to do until I see the old boy on Long Island. I’ll hear from him in time to plan another business trip.””

He's just saying this to himself, unprompted, loud enough for the driver to hear.

Harry's lack of cabbie skills seem to do him another favor as well, as Johnny seems to get impatient and tells him to pull over by a food van at the side of the road. In his conversation with Wang Fu last chapter, it was revealed that Johnny owns a street food company, so this van is probably being operated by his dudes. He also, surprisingly, invites the cabbie to take a break and eat with him, saying that he'll pay for the extra time as well as the food itself. Damn, this guy is a little higher up in the criminal pecking order than I thought, if he's able to be this frugal with this little provocation. You'd think someone with his mouth wouldn't have been able to make it for, but well, you know, this book is dumb. So, they sit by the food van, whose operators recognize and greet "English Johnny," who they are surprised to see back in town so suddenly. They eat and leave.

No payoff. No overheard conversation. Just...half a page spent on teaching us that his nickname is "English." It's not even especially flavorful, in terms of acquainting the reader with contemporary New York street food or the like. It's almost all just bland dialogue between Johnny and his underlings about him being back in town and having an idiosyncratic nickname.

Another cab swings by and tries to nab Johnny, but Johnny sticks with Harry. The cabbies all seem to know Johnny, which lends credence to some of the boasts he made to Wang Fu last chapter about knowing everyone and being liked by everyone on the NYC streets. This interaction serves no apparent purpose besides reaffirming that, though. Harry drives him onward, and fucks up a left turn that attracts the attention of a cop. The cop also knows Johnny, and chats with him while demanding Harry's license.

Which Harry doesn't have on him.

-_____-

Why does Harry not have his driver's license on him?

It was established earlier in the book that he does have one. Why the hell would he not have brought it with him?

Maybe he does have the license, but he's just afraid the cop will notice that his name doesn't match the one on his cab's driver card, but...is the cop actually going to be looking for discrepancies there? Maybe? I don't know why he'd bother. And even if he did, is it actually legally mandatory for cab drivers to post their real names on their dashes? Maybe it was, IDK.

Harry fishes around in his pockets to stall while he tries to think of what to do. Fortunately for Harry, Johnny is already impatient to get to his destination, so he asks the cop to not make this take any longer for him by ticketing the cabbie, and Johnny's food trucks always give him free donuts so the cop grudgingly lets Harry off with a warning and doesn't bother with the license check. Also, we learn that English Johnny's real last name is Harmon. Okay. There's no other payoff to this extended sequence.

A bit later, Johnny tells Harry to pull over and accuses him of giving him the runaround, as he's doing a really bad job of navigating to the destination. Harry stumbles out excuses, which Johnny doesn't buy. Then, narrowing his eyes suspiciously, he tells Harry to repeat the address he told him to drive to. Harry does some much quicker thinking than he did during the license fiasco, and determines that if this gang-connected man is suspicious of him, he might decide that Harry knowing the address is A Problem. So, Harry leans in on the stupid act and claims to have forgotten the address and been too dumb to think to ask for it again.

Johnny has trouble believing that someone that stupid could actually survive to adulthood, and asks Harry if he was planning to take him somewhere to rob/murder/etc. They start arguing. Another cab driver pulls over for some reason, and initially takes Harry's side before quickly siding with Johnny when he hears the details. Another cop seems to be attracted to the commotion. Harry has to just put the car back in gear and floor it to escape, and has to indulge in a brief physical altercation to do it before the cop catches up; he's just lucky that the other cabbie tried to pull Johnny away from him, as Johnny's cheerful, friendly demeanor had pretty well given way to "hardened criminal in fight mode" at that point. Harry just barely manages to get the cab returned to the garage without being tracked and caught; it's mostly luck that no one caught the license plate.

After he returns to the hotel, Harry gets a call asking about something random, but with emphasized words to encode a request for Johnny's destination. Harry provides it, but doesn't seem to think of the possibility that Johnny might have been planning to change destinations at the last minute like several other characters have done so far.

Then, the narration tells us to be excited about this day's events, and Harry goes to sleep without doing any real introspection. End chapter.


This was the most overwritten chapter in the book. It's one of the most overwritten chapters I've read in *any* book. Almost 50% longer than average for "The Living Shadow's" chapters, and almost all flavorless filler. It's just "Johnny is charismatic and streetsmart" illustrated again and again without any new details coming to light, or really any escalation to the degree of these traits. Harry made (easily) his worst fuckups so far in this chapter, but there was no self-recrimination or introspection over them even though he's engaged in that for much more understandable mistakes before.

No real plot progression. No revelations. Harry got to do a little bit of proactive problem solving, but the problems were all his fault in the first place which makes this exercise of his agency sort of a mixed bag as far as keeping my investment. Combined with the persistently bland writing and samey, back-and-forth dialogue, and this was just a frustrating and irritating experience.

23. English Johnny's Game​

"English" John Harmon, known to some as “Johnny English” to his chagrin, arrives at his local residence, still irritated about recent events. He of all people knows that New York has thieves and conmen to spare, but he doesn't like letting any of them try to target HIM, even unsuccessfully, without making them regret it. Still, he doesn't seem to suspect that Harry is an enemy agent; just a random swindler. That's good at least.

On the other hand, much of his networking skill is down to him never forgetting a face. He adds Harry's to the collection of ones he'll punch if he ever happens to spot again. That's a gun being conspicuously set on the mantlepiece.

He gave the second driver a false address a short distance from where he actually lives, and then walked from there. He may or may not have done the same thing to Harry in the first place, in which case Harry's intel will be off, but it's also possible that he wasn't feeling that suspicious to begin with before Harry spooked him. Well, regardless. He's received a letter, which he rips apart after reading, but also muses about out loud as he's rather ridiculously prone to do.

“Half aloud, he repeated the information that he had gathered from the letter: “Expect to complete matters to−night. We will meet away out on Saturday night, at eight o’clock. If plans are changed, you will hear by Saturday morning.”

It was now Thursday night. The meeting was to take place in two days.

”That’s good,” mumbled English Johnny. “The old boy is getting busy at last. Eight o’clock. That will get me back to Wang Foo’s by eleven.””

I'm guessing the Shadow knows all that too now, due to being hidden under a potted plant or something. Then again, he didn't know the guy's address until conferring with Harry by phone, which I think was probably after this, so maybe not.

Johnny writes a letter back to whoever it is (most likely Bingham, from the context) saying that everything is in order and he'll be able to make the exchanges as scheduled. The narration notes that Johnny's handwriting is terse and misspelled; he's a good in-person communicator, but he seems to only be semi-literate. Noted.

He takes the letter outside to mail, and then comes back in and keeps talking to himself about how the incident with that sketchy cab driver has him rattled. He knows it was probably just a random robber, but the timing makes him uncomfortable, and he remembers Wang Fu's advice that you can never be too careful regarding opsec. Johnny honestly comes across as fairly sympathetic and relatable here, as he muses on the possibility that he might have crosshairs on him but isn't sure if he's just being paranoid. He has a mixture of hardened criminal and everyman in over his head that feels more nuanced than most of this story's baddies, and...kind of makes him a foil to Harry, honestly. All the way down to the street-level middleman niche for his own employers, the social butterfly act, and the reliance on cabs and anonymous letters. His lack of education also suggests that, like Harry, he's from a lower class background of one kind or another.

I find myself wishing that we'd been introduced to John Harmon earlier on.

Thanks to his anxious state of mind, Johnny is listening to his environment more intently than usual, which is why he hears an almost imperceptible click of his front door that he knows he'd have otherwise missed. He goes to check it out, and thinks the shadows in the vestibule are a little thicker and darker than normal, though they thin out again as he approaches. He also gets the "someone watching me" sense that he's learned to trust over the years.

He retreats back into the well-lit living room, and is more alarmed than ever when nobody tries to attack him. If this were an assassin, the shadowy vestibule hall would have been the perfect place to strike. The intruder didn't strike, though, and the timing with the suspicious cab driver is too close to be coincidence. Not a burglar either, then, but a spy.

Johnny considers this to be the worst possibility. An assassin, he's reasonably confident he can fight off; he is armed and used to fighting. A burglar, he wouldn't be overly concerned about; he doesn't keep anything too valuable in this place. A spy though...that poses a type of threat that his skillset is less suited for dealing with. And, while he's careful about destroying evidence, he knows that a skilled investigator could probably find clues in his house that could lead them to his employers, and then it's game over for him.

...

This guy isn't just better written than the other villains. He's better written than the damned protagonist.

...

Johnny retreats to his bedroom, sits with his back to the door, and whistles to himself while scribbling some nonsense characters onto a notepad at his desk. Every minute or so, he abruptly stops whistling and tries to listen for anyone who might have been sneaking up to his bedroom door. Damn, he's clever! And in a way that has a lot of personality to it as well!

He doesn't quite catch any sounds with that trap of his. However, when he takes a break from his nonsense-scribbling with an affected sigh of frustration, he managed to get the door behind him just barely inside his field of vision, and notes that it's a few inches open. The way it would be if, say, someone had been slowly working it open a couple centimeters at a time under the notes of his whistling. Johnny is afraid, but he reminds himself that if this guy wanted to kill him, he'd have probably done it already. So, he just keeps scribbling for a few moments, and then growls to himself in frustration and tears the page up before starting to write on a fresh paper. He writes a letter saying the exact opposite of what he just wrote to Bingham a little while ago, and then gets up and opens the window to smoke a cigarette while looking out over the evening cityscape.

When he looks back into the room, he observes that the shadow cast by the chair that he slung his overcoat and hat over is a slightly larger, slightly different shape than it had been before. He was paying careful attention to that. But, he doesn't let his eyes linger on it. Instead, he just returns to his desk, picks up the fake letter, and puts it in an envelope, which he proceeds to take outside and mail to the address of some random food van chef that works for him.

After returning home, he just relaxes and does boring stuff until he's reasonably sure the spy has left, assuming they ever followed him back home after he mailed the phony letter. He remembers the reports of Croaker having talked about "the Shadow" before he was killed, and now makes the connection with some other rumors he's heard in the local underworld about a stealthy rogue actor. He also, briefly, remembers the unusually large shadow cast by that Chinese clerk back at the tea shop, but mostly discards that particular detail. Because, well...whether or not the Shadow actually is *supposed* to be magic, I can't think of a way those disguises of his could possibly work WITHOUT magic, and Johnny doesn't believe in it, so. Regardless of whether these things actually are all connected, Johnny is pretty damned sure that someone just broke into his house and snuck into his bedroom with him in it, and only slightly less sure that he's successfully fed that someone fake intel. He may even be right about that. End chapter.


Slow start, but man did it pick up! The creeping, borderline-invisible presence of the Shadow was real horror movie stuff, and it was hard not to think of Johnny as the hero of the story as he boldly contended with it. Keeping his wits about him, and also not giving in to the temptation to believe he was just imagining things as I'm sure most people would have. This was almost like a submarine duel, with the tense cat-and-mouse interplay with an invisible opponent whose very existence you can't be totally sure of.

I can also see the logic in placing this chapter right after the previous one. Johnny isn't just a foil to Harry; he's also a much more experienced version of Harry who's been playing this game for many years to Harry's couple of months. Highlighting Johnny's skill and cunning against Harry's clumsiness and inexperience really builds Johnny up as a major challenge for him, as well as, ironically, sort of an aspirational figure. I mean, we've had three or four "Shadow spying on someone" chapters, and Johnny is the only person to have actually (seemingly) gotten the upper hand in one of those!

In light of all that, as well as the established details of Johnny being comfortable with violence and frequently coming and going around the state, it's looking pretty likely that he killed Laidlow. The "woven facts" scene a few chapters ago seemed to conclude that Burgess was the murderer, but that story didn't feel right to me then and it still doesn't now. I might be wrong, but I think it's more likely than not that Johnny was the one who did the actual deed, just from the framing.

My biggest complaints about this are, as previously stated, that Johnny should have had at least one appearance much earlier in the story to establish his importance, and that Harry needed to have more character development in order to carry this kind of foil instead of being outshined by him.

Or maybe I just like Johnny because I resent how hamfistedly this story talks up the Shadow, and so anyone who can foil him - and better yet, do it in a show-don't-tell sequence - is necessarily going to get me rooting for them.

But yeah. Well done scene. Probably the best one of the book so far. And, with those two longer-than-usual chapters finished, I'm more than happy calling this a post.