Walter Gibson persuaded the magazine's editor, Frank Blackwell, to let him write the first novel, The Living Shadow, which appeared in the first issue, dated April 1931.
Paper shortages during World War II forced Street & Smith to reduce the magazine's format from pulp to digest-sized.
The success of The Shadow made it very influential, and many other single-character pulps soon appeared, featuring a lead novel in every issue about the magazine's main character.
Street & Smith quickly followed up with Doc Savage, and other publishers launched The Spider, The Phantom Detective, and titles in other genres such as Westerns and science fiction.
In the first episode, at 9:30 p.m. on July 31, 1930, James La Curto spoke the line: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
La Curto left after a few weeks for a role in a Broadway play, and was replaced in the role by Frank Readick Jr.[4][5] The show only lasted for a year, but listeners started asking at newsstands for a copy of "the Shadow magazine",[4][5] and though they were actually asking for Detective Story Magazine, Street & Smith realized there was a demand waiting to be filled.
[2] Henry W. Ralston, Street & Smith's business manager, decided that this was an opportunity to revive the idea of a magazine based around a single character.
[2][6] He asked Frank Blackwell, the editor of Detective Story Magazine, to launch The Shadow, and provided him with an old manuscript of a Nick Carter novel that had never been published.
[2] Pulp historians Will Murray and Robert Weinberg suggest that Street & Smith's expectations for the magazine must have been low, because they reused old cover art, rather than commissioning something new.
Starting with the April 1932 issue, Street & Smith assigned John Nanovic as the editor of The Shadow, and he, Ralston, and Gibson met regularly to plot the stories.
[6][1] Rosmond was replaced at the end of 1948 by Daisy Bacon, who persuaded Ralston to return to the old pulp format for the next issue, now on a quarterly schedule, dated Winter 1948.
[17] Frank Blackwell & Lon Murray John Nanovic Charles Moran Babette Rosmond William De Grouchy Daisy Bacon The Shadow established the format for the single-character pulps that followed it: every issue featured a novel about the main character, though the additional short stories accompanying it did not.
[2] The first novel, titled The Living Shadow, begins with a young man being saved from suicide by a stranger whose "face was entirely obscured by a broad-brimmed felt hat bent downward over the features".
Hulse agrees with Murray that the early 1940s saw the quality of the novels drop off, but identifies 1937, when the Shadow's identity is revealed, as the start of the decline.
They featured Lamont Cranston as the main character, rather than the Shadow himself, and were short, and relegated to the back of the magazine by the editor, Rosmond, who was "not a fan of the hero pulps", in Hulse's words.
[9] Each issue included short stories, all in the detective genre, by writers such as Frank Gruber, Norman Daniels, and John D. MacDonald.
[20] The interior art was often by Tom Lovell in the early years; he was followed by Edd Cartier and Earl Mayan, and then during the war by Paul Orban.
[21] Other publishers quickly cashed in on the new genre: Ned Pines' Thrilling Group came out with The Phantom Detective in February 1933, and Popular Publications launched The Spider, also about a crime-fighter, in October 1933.
[22][23] Over the next few years, single-character pulps were tried in other genres, including Westerns (such as Pete Rice Magazine, from Street & Smith), science fiction (Captain Future, from Thrilling Group), and many more.
[2] The editor was initially Frank Blackwell, with the assistance of Lon Murray; John Nanovic took over with the April 1932 issue and stayed until November 1943.