The War of the Worlds Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

nature a greedy man, Gibson wrote for money; despite his pen name’s fame, and his popular character’s prominence, his pay rate for pulp publisher Street and Smith did not compare to those of writers in the slick magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s , much less authors of hardcover books—pulpsters like Dash Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner had made the switch, but Gibson had never had room enough in his schedule to give it a try. These were hard times, and the $500 per novel was good money only if he kept up his output.
    After all, a writer couldn’t sell a story he hadn’t written. So Gibson’s motto was: Write till it hurts; then write some more .
    As he rode through Manhattan in the back of a Yellow Cab, wraithed in his own cigarette smoke, Gibson sat with a small valise on the floor and his portable Corona typewriter on the seat next to him, a rider as important as himself—at least.
    With his salt-and-pepper hair neatly combed back, his round-lensed wire-frame spectacles, his oval face with the regular, intelligent features, he looked more like a lawyer or a businessman than the master of intrigue who dispatched the cloaked avenger known as the Shadow to take on campaigns against crime (any time he visited New York, he only half-consciously scouted locations for such gangster tales), and to bring down world-domination-minded masterminds like the Voodoo Master and Shiwan Khan.
    He’d come down this morning by train from Maine—his home was in Philly, but he and Jewel had a cabin up north, on Little Sebago Lake, where they were spending more and more of their time. No stranger to Manhattan, he and his wife had lived in an apartment on West 46 th for about a year, so he could be closer to the editorial offices of Street and Smith.
    But he’d found the city distracting, too many plays and movies and restaurants to tempt a writer away from work; plus he was spending not nearly enough time with his son Robert (who lived with first wife Charlotte). Returning to Philadelphia and then building the cabin in Maine had made seeing Bobby more practical; the boy had been summering with his father and stepmother these past several years.
    The cabin provided a kind of knotty-pine womb for Gibson’s ideas to grow within. He would sit at a large pinewood desk in a corner of the central room with its vaulted ceilings,chain-smoking (cigarettes his chief stress reliever) and dreaming up yarns. No phone was allowed (calls came in to the cabin next door, where his cousin Eaton lived) with the silence punctuated only by the calls of loons and other birds out on the lake.
    Not that silence was required for him to create: he’d written one Shadow novel while the carpenters built his office around him. He’d written much of another at a party in New York, with other guests reading the yarn over his shoulder—the experience had only exhilarated him.
    Trips to New York were commonplace to Gibson, who enjoyed delivering plot synopses in person to editor John Nanovic, who’d become a good friend. Nanovic made useful suggestions, and Gibson felt the editor had come to know the Shadow as well as his creator.
    Unlike a lot of editors, Nanovic did not stint on the compliments. He frequently told Gibson (in varying words), “You’ve got the newspaperman’s knack for giving me just enough facts to take me into the next paragraph...and the magician’s flare to intrigue me with hints of what’s to come.”
    Later this afternoon, he would meet with Nanovic. Right now (it was just after one-thirty) he had his first stop to make—at the Columbia Broadcasting Building at Madison Avenue and 45 th Street. The Shadow had been born in this building, and yet the father of the character had never visited the birthsite before.
    Technically, of course, Gibson was the character’s step father. In 1930 a radio show had been introduced at CBS, Detective Story , that based its episodes on stories from the Street and Smith pulp