The Shadow Knows

One of the great covers Jim Steranko did for The Shadow series - published by Pyramid & Jove - that sadly only got to 23 books.
Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant) apparently wrote over 350 novel length stories featuring The Shadow & only a handful made it into paperback form in the 60s & 70s. It's a shame, for instance, that The Gibbering Things never made it into paperback form, a title on a par with The Exploding Lake or The Awful Egg in Kenneth Robeson's Doc Savage series.
Bantam stayed committed to publishing all 182 of the Doc Savage books, while most publishers seemed not so besotted with The Shadow. It's a shame as the only other format they're printed in is the original Street & Smith magazines - which cost a lot.
The Shadow always fascinated me partly because he's a weirdo, but mostly because he's hardly ever the main character - he always gets his faithful followers to do all the leg work. All The Shadow really ever does is sit in a dark room somewhere taunting wrong doers by laughing through a concealed radio speaker at them & freaking them out. Doc Savage, on the other hand, pretty much does everything - and his loyal team have little to do other than argue & punch holes in doors.
I recently acquired some tapes of old 40s radio shows with Orson Welles proclaiming; ' Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!'
Like most other super heroes, they made a film, they missed the point, it was shit.