The War of the Worlds Murder d-6

by Max Allan Collins

  “Ian Fleming did the same thing,” I said.

  “Please!” the Guest of Honor said, removing his hand from my shoulder before I had to. “He was a hack, too.”

  I felt the red climbing into my face; and I could hear the quiver in my voice as I said: “Let me tell you something, Mr. Trout-everybody in this room, including yourself, has a career because of Mickey Spillane. It was his enormous success in the early ’50s that made crime fiction, and paperbacks, explode. You don’t have to like his work to show a little gratitude and have some common respect for the man who gave all of us…yourself included…a career.”

  Quite a few people were listening now. The moment could not have been more awkward. An upstart, barely published brat from Iowa had verbally assaulted their honored guest. On the other hand, a few heads were nodding. Here and there. Less than vindication, but nice.

  “Mickey Spillane will never receive a Grand Master Award from the MWA,” Trout said. “He…poses…with…guns…on…his…dust jackets.”

  Then the Guest of Honor moved unsteadily away for another drink.

  But when he’d passed across my vision, Trout revealed someone else…

  …Walter Gibson.

  The creator of the Shadow was smiling at me as if he’d just spotted his long-lost nephew.

  He approached me with the grace of the trained stage performer he was. His blue eyes holding eye contact with me, he said to Steinbrunner, “Chris, why don’t you introduce me to this young man?”

  But Gibson’s hand was already outstretched.

  I shook it; the grasp was firm. “Mr. Gibson,” I said, “it’s an honor. I’m a big fan.”

  That might have been overstating it: I was not a collector of the valuable old pulp magazines, but I’d read some of the reprints, as well as that recent Shadow paperback I’d mentioned to Chris.

  And this was the man who created one of the most famous characters in popular fiction: the Shadow, the sometimes-invisible crimefighter who clouded men’s minds, and knew what evil lurked in their hearts.

  Chris made the introductions, and then Gibson said, “I admire you for standing up to that pompous fool.”

  “Really? Are you a Spillane fan?”

  He shrugged. “Not particularly. He’s done very well updating the Black Mask pulp technique-Carroll John Daly originated that kind of thing with Race Williams, of course. And there’s some of the Shadow in Mike Hammer, too, don’t you think?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “The old idea of an avenging figure is just as good today as it ever was-the best mysteries always center around one character. Look at Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula.”

  “But if you’re not a Spillane fan-”

  He patted my shoulder. “You were absolutely right to defend a writer you admire. Writers shouldn’t go around bad-mouthing other writers. And I don’t much like hearing disrespect to pulp writers, either. That was my world, you know.”

  I nodded; sipped my Coke. “How much work did you do for the radio Shadow show?”

  “Not much-conceptual stuff in the beginning. Sort of helped map it out.” He shrugged. “I like my stuff better.”

  Spoken like a true writer!

  Gibson’s face creased with amusement. “But you don’t look old enough to’ve heard the Shadow on the radio.”

  “It was still on in the mid-fifties,” I said. “I was five or six…I’d listen to it, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and Dragnet. In bed at night.” I gave a mock shiver. “The Shadow was the first good guy who ever scared my little behind.”

  Gibson gave a grudging nod. “Well, that sinister laugh was a good touch. I’ll give ’em that. But you are too young for the pulps.”

  “I read your Shadow paperback. Really liked it. And the reprints. A lot of fun.”

  “Good-that’s what they were meant to be…. That Shadow laugh, you know, it wasn’t Orson Welles.”

  “Really?”

  “Everybody thinks it was, and Orson always claimed it as his…but it was a fella called Readick, Frank Readick. He was the first Shadow, when the character was just a spooky narrator, not active in the stories. They used Readick’s opening till the end, I think. But Orson got the credit-typically.”

  “Did you know Orson Welles?”

  The Citizen Kane wunderkind had famously played the Shadow on the radio in the ’30s, barely out of his teens.

  “Oh, I knew him all right,” Gibson said.

  Chris’s owlish countenance brightened. “Really? You never mentioned you met Welles.”

  Gibson’s shrug was as grand as it was casual. “I don’t believe you ever asked, Chris.”

  “You have me there, Walter. But I knew you didn’t have much to do with the radio version, so I never thought to ask.”

  Gibson smiled in a way that said he had nothing more to add to this subject.

  The conversation turned to Gibson’s enduring penchant for magic, and how he could still do a mean card trick. He showed us a couple, and they were suitably mystifying-cards appearing in one of Gibson’s pockets, the apparent mind reading of a card I’d selected. Finally, Chris-who’d seen this magic many times-wandered off and got involved in another conversation; and by now Bob Randisi had disappeared somewhere.

  Suddenly it was the Shadow creator and the kid from Iowa, alone in the crowded suite.

  “I’ve always loved Orson Welles,” I said, returning gingerly to the topic. “What were the circumstances of you knowing him, if you weren’t very involved with the radio program?”

  “Well…” Gibson, who was nursing a beer, glanced about the smoky room, as if to make sure no one was around; of course, thirty or thirty-five people were around….

  “If I’m overstepping…”

  Gibson studied me; something about him seemed at once ancient and childlike. “It is a hell of a story.”

  “And you’re a hell of a storyteller, Mr. Gibson.”

  He let out a single laugh. “And don’t think I wouldn’t get a kick out of sharing it with somebody. It’s just…well, a lot of the people are still alive.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand…”

  “People could still get in trouble-at the very least, be embarrassed, badly so.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Suppose we went down to the bar, and found a quiet corner…”

  “I know just the corner.”

  “Would you promise not to tell anyone? At least, not until the players have…shuffled off this mortal coil? As Orson might put it.”

  “I won’t betray your confidence, Mr. Gibson.”

  “When a magician shares a magic trick with a student, he must do so in full confidence that the student will guard the secret of that trick.”

  “You’re killin’ me, Mr. Gibson…. I have to hear this story….”

  He grinned his uncle’s grin. “You deserve a reward, young man. For sticking up for your hero. For sticking up for pulp writers everywhere…. Let’s go down and have a few more beers. Who knows how good this story might get?”

  The two of us eased out of the suite, unseen shadows slipping into the night-or at least, the hallway.

  Soon we had settled into our corner of the little bar off the lobby, and I’d bought a pitcher of beer, though over the next hour and a half, we barely dented it. The tale Walter Gibson told provided all the intoxication either of us needed.

  His eyes narrowed in thought in the pleasant, jowly face. “It was just about…let me do the computation…thirty-seven years ago. Almost exactly thirty-seven years ago. I was older than you, but not by much.”

  “Thirty-seven years…what, 1938 then? Was Welles still doing the Shadow?”

  “He’d just quit. The show was on Sunday afternoons, done live, and young Orson had a new program…The Mercury Theatre on the Air….”

  “Wait a minute…this weekend-Hallowe’en’s just days away.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Isn’t Hallowe’en when…?”

  “Yes it was.”

  I w
as sitting forward. “ ‘The War of the Worlds’…most famous radio show of all time. And you were there?”

  “Yes,” Gibson said, eyes twinkling. “I was.” He was staring at me with mischievious delight over his folded hands, those fingers that had pounded out so many pulp yarns, one of them wearing an impressive gold ring that I realized was a replica of the Shadow’s famous fire opal. “And I’ve never told a soul about it…not even any of my wives.”

  A chill of excitement went up my spine; I hadn’t felt anything like it since my bedroom was dark and I was six and the Shadow was laughing his deep, sinister laugh….

  “But you’re going to tell me, aren’t you, Mr. Gibson?”

  “Call me Walter…. And yes, I am. I am indeed going to tell you. I’m going to tell you about the murder that happened thirty-seven years ago, right in the CBS studios-the day, the night, that Orson Welles sent America into a panic. A murder that even the Martians didn’t know about….”

  And he began to speak, in a mellow voice that was not as commanding as that of Orson Welles, but commanding enough, stage magician that Walter Gibson had been, and still was. His was a voice in the near darkness, and I sat enthralled by it, much as so many in the mid-twentieth century had crowded around their radio consoles in their own homes in Depression-era America.

  Now another thirty years have passed.

  And I’ve never told anybody the story. Not my wife. Not even Bob Randisi.

  Walter Gibson is gone; so is Chris Steinbrunner, and Lawrence R. Trout, too. A few years ago I was Guest of Honor at a Bouchercon, and I’m pleased to report that no one treated me as badly as I treated the esteemed Mr. Trout. Mickey Spillane, at 87, is still with us; and a few years back, I was among a handful of mystery writers who saw to it that Mike Hammer’s creator did indeed receive a Grand Master Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

  But just about everyone who was at CBS the day and night of “The War of the Worlds” broadcast is long since gone-among them, Howard Koch, the scriptwriter, and Welles’s partner and future nemesis, John Houseman. Paul Stewart (so memorable a bad guy in the film of Spillane’s Kiss Me, Deadly) has left the earthly studio, as has the musical genius Bernard Herrmann, who lives on in such film scores as Vertigo, North by Northwest and Taxi Driver.

  Welles himself, of course, has also departed, though leaving behind a handful of classic films and a certain unforgettable, history-making radio broadcast.

  No one can be hurt now, or even embarrassed, by my revealing what really occurred at CBS, on the eve of Hallowe’en in 1938.

  I have added to the account Walter shared with me in that Palmer House bar in Chicago in 1975 a good deal of research into the other events of October 30, 1938-the ones that occurred outside the CBS studios. So the picture I will paint, in the theater of your mind, will flesh out somewhat the story the Shadow’s creator shared with me.

  And I must admit that nothing in my research confirmed what Walter said, in our dark corner of the hotel bar at Bouchercon Six; but nothing contradicted it, either….

  I leave it to you to decide, and remain obediently yours,

  Max Allan Collins

  October 31, 2004

  Muscatine, Iowa

  THURSDAY

  OCTOBER 27, 1938

  B y 1938, that experimental novelty known as radio had become mass communication, informing and entertaining listeners from (as announcers of the era so loved to point out) coast to coast.

  In 1920 the first public broadcast told the United States that President Harding had been elected; now President Roosevelt was using the medium for “fireside chats”…and when November rolled around, FDR (and all American politicians) would listen with rapt attention to election returns, courtesy of this most immediate of mediums.

  The first radio entertainment emanated from a garage in Pittsburgh-station KDKA-serving thousands; now ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with his dummy Charlie McCarthy brought laughter to over thirty million every Sunday night on their Chase and Sanborn Hour. The drawing power of the young medium could hardly be denied, even if the popularity of a ventriloquist act unseen by its audience did raise certain questions about the willingness of these listeners to buy just about anything, and not just what the sponsors were selling….

  If the diversions radio provided were less sophisticated than those of a concert hall, the Broadway theater or even your neighborhood moviehouse, Amos ’n’ Andy, Major Bowes and Fibber McGee and Molly didn’t cost a dime, and were accessible at the flip of a switch and the turn of a dial. After all, just about everybody had a radio-ten million were sold per year, most homes having at least one, with car radios and portable sets making broadcasting a mobile member of the family. Radio was seriously undermining newspapers as the nation’s preferred news source (ironically, many stations were owned by those same papers), even while providing-in a country still reeling from the Depression-a cheap alternative to movies.

  Popular music over the air also helped fight those Depression blues, with remote broadcasts from ballrooms and nightclubs in major cities bringing big bands and that new fad, swing, into living rooms. And of course if a news story broke, an announcer could always interrupt to keep Americans “coast to coast” instantaneously informed.

  Which meant the average person felt more a part of things these days-even in the smallest American hamlet a listener could witness the marriage of the Duke of Windsor to Mrs. Simpson, and attend the Braddock-Louis heavyweight fight; or get firsthand reports on the great flood of the Mississippi Valley, and have the dirigible Hindenburg explode before their very ears.

  It was a world where listeners were quite used to hearing from the president and comedian W.C. Fields within the same half hour-a world that happened to be on the brink of war, a populace waiting by the radio console for news of a first attack….

  In the meantime, between this steady diet of comedy, music and news, a hardy handful of creators attempted to bring quality drama to the networks. Arch Oboler, with his pioneering, Twilight Zone-like Lights Out used innovative sound effects to project his movies of the mind, while radio’s “poet laureate” Norman Corwin trusted well-chosen words to grant his fantasies and satires literary qualities rare in a medium that already seemed crass.

  At age twenty-two, Orson Welles-acclaimed and controversial as the boy genius of Broadway, a radio veteran thanks to a rich deep voice beyond his years-brought his skills and his talented associates to a project called First-Person Singular, soon to be renamed The Mercury Theatre on the Air. He was the star, narrator, writer, producer and director-at least according to the press releases-and a more ambitious slate of radio adaptations would be difficult to imagine: the first season (1937) began with an outstanding version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was followed in short order by Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Around the World in 80 Days and Julius Caesar, among others.

  But the 1938 season found the celebrated, acclaimed new series up against the most popular radio show in the nation-Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy’s aforementioned Chase amp; Sanborn Hour, which pulled in about 35 percent of the radio audience. After seven broadcasts in its new Sunday-night slot against America’s most popular puppet, The Mercury Theatre on the Air was drawing less than four percent.

  Something would have to be done.

  CHAPTER ONE

  RADIO DAZE

  Walter Gibson had never been on an expense account before.

  Not even in the earliest days of his writing career, when he’d been a reporter on the North American in Philly, and then the Evening Ledger-never.

  Of course, even then his work out in the field had been limited, once the editor learned of the Gibson facility for puzzles and quizzes. Turning out “brain tests” and crossword puzzles-not to mention articles on magic and bunco games-Gibson had spent more time in an office in front of a typewriter than out news gathering.

  The irony was, Walter Gibson had the soul of an adventurer-his mind, since earliest childho
od, had brimmed with magic and mysticism and men of action. He enjoyed the great out-of-doors; and he craved the companionship and conversation of lively, intelligent people-as fetching as his wife Jewel was, her ability to stand toe-to-toe with him intellectually, on any number of esoteric topics, had attracted him most.

  From his teens on, he’d performed in semi-professional magic acts and had sought, successfully, the scintillating company of stage magicians, including some of the most eminent-Thurston, Blackstone, Dunninger, even Houdini.

  And yet Walter Gibson’s talent for storytelling, his ease with words, had condemned him to this jail cell of a career. Not that this was a sentence he minded serving: self-expression was his overriding obsession; and the challenge of a writing assignment energized him, though each one consigned him further to a solitary life in a small room with his only company a typewriter and his imagination. Even his association with those illustrious magicians had led primarily to ghostwriting articles and books for them.

  Under his nom de plume Maxwell Grant, Gibson had learned to be content with the adventures of his famous character, the Shadow, playing out in the theater of his mind; and the conversations in which he found himself most often engaged were between characters of his own creation, speaking to each other with sharp, pointed intelligence, courtesy of his flying fingers.

  Right now those famous fingertips (“1,440,000 WORDS WERE WRITTEN BY MAXWELL GRANT IN LESS THAN 10 MONTHS ON A CORONA TYPEWRITER,” went one national ad) were bandaged; well, all but his thumbs. He looked like someone who had ill-advisedly placed his fingertips on a stove’s burner; instead, he was a professional writer of pulp magazines who had yesterday completed his twenty-fourth 50,000-word Shadow novel of the year, opening up the remaining months of 1938 for other assignments.

  Though he was not by 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.