The Quorum

by Kim Newman

  Crosbie left. Harry and Greg looked at each other and, for no reason, started laughing like members of a family sharing a joke they could never explain to an outsider.

  ‘Considering Dr Shade must be about 150 by now,’ Harry began, ‘I thought we’d start the strip with him trying to get the DHSS to up his heating allowance for the winter...’

  SHADE, DOCTOR Scientific vigilante of mysterious origins, usually hidden behind a cloak and goggle-like dark glasses, although also a master of disguise with many other identities. Operating out of an outwardly dilapidated but inwardly luxurious retreat in London’s East End, he employs a group of semi-criminal bully boys in his neverending war against foreign elements importing evil into the heart of the British Empire. Originally introduced (under the name ‘Dr Jonathan Shadow’) as a minor character in The Cur of Limehouse (1929), a novel by Rex Cash (Donald Moncrieff), in which he turns up in the final chapters to help the aristocratic pugilist hero Reggie Brandon defeat the East End opium warlord Baron Quon. The character was so popular with the readers of Wendover’s Magazine, the monthly publication in which the novel was serialised, that Moncrieff wrote several series of short adventures, later collected in the volumes Dr Shadow and the Poison Goddess (1931) and Dr Shadow’s Nigger Trouble (1932). In 1934, alleging plagiarism of their character, THE SHADOW, Street and Smith threatened to sue Badgerfield, publishers of Wendover’s and of the collections, and, to appease the American firm, the character was renamed Dr Shade.

  A semi-supernatural, ultra-patriotic avenger whose politics would seem to be somewhat to the right of those of Sapper’s Bulldog DRUMMOND or the real-life Oswald Mosley (of whom Moncrieff was reputed to be a great admirer), Dr Shade is much given to executing minor villains with his airgun or gruesomely torturing them for information. He appeared in nearly 100 short novels, all credited to Rex Cash, written for Dr Shade Monthly, a pulp periodical issued by Badgerfield from 1934 until 1947. The house pseudonym was also used by a few other writers, mostly for back-up stories in the 1930s, when the prolific Moncrieff’s inspiration flagged. The character became even more popular when featured in a daily strip in the Evening Argus, most famously drawn by Frank FitzGerald, from 1935 to 1952. Moncrieff, after a bitter dispute with Lord Badgerfield, stopped writing Dr Shade in 1939, and the strip was taken over by Harry Lipman, a writer who had done a few Dr Shade stories for the magazine. By the outbreak of war, Lipman had effectively become Rex Cash, and was producing stories and novels for the magazine as well as scripting the strip.

  Lipmans Dr Shade is a less frightening figure than Moncrieff’s. Although his uniform and gadgets are unchanged, Lipman’s hero is an official agent of the British government who refrained from sadistically mistreating his enemies the way Moncrieff’s had. It was revealed that Dr Shade is really Dr Jonathan Chambers, an honest and dedicated general practitioner, and the supernatural elements of the strip were toned down. During WWII, Dr Shade’s politics changed; as written by Moncrieff, he is an implacable foe of the non-white races and international communism, but Lipmans hero is a straightforward defender of democracy in the face of the Nazi menace. Moncrieff’s Moriarty figure, introduced in Dr Shade and the Whooping Horror (1934), is Israel Cohen, a stereotypically Jewish master criminal in league with Russian anarchists and Indian Thuggees in a plot to destroy Britain’s naval superiority. During the War, Cohen was retired (although he returned in the late 1940s as a comic East End nightclub owner and friend of Dr Shade) and the penumbral adventurer, joined by two-fisted American OSS agent Henry Hemingway and peppy girl reporter Penny Stamp, concentrated exclusively on licking Hitler.

  Moncrieff’s Dr Shade novels include Dr Shade Vs the Dynamite Boys (1936), A Yellow Man’s Treachery (1936), Dr Shade’s Balkan Affair (1937), To the Last Drop of Our British Blood (1937), The Bulldog Bites Back (1937), The International Conspirators (1938) and Dr Shade in Suez (1939), while Lipmans are Dr Shade’s Home Front (1940), Underground in France (1941), Dr Shade Takes Over (1943), Dr Shade in Tokyo (1945), Dr Shade Buries the Hatchet (1948) and The Piccadilly Gestapo (1951). The character also featured in films, beginning with Dr Shade’s Phantom Taxi Mystery (1936; dir. Michael Powell), in which he was played by Raymond Massey, while Francis L. Sullivan was a decidedly non-Semitic Israel Cohen, renamed ‘Idris Kobon’. Valentine Dyall took the role in a BBC Radio serial from 1943 to 1946, and Ronald Howard wore the cloak in a 1963 Rediffusion TV serial, Introducing Dr Shade..., with Elizabeth Shepherd as Penny Stamp and Alfie Bass as Israel Cohen.

  See also: Dr Shade’s associates: Reggie BRANDON, Lord Highbury and Islington; Henry HEMINGWAY (Hank the Yank); Penny STAMP, Girl Reporter; and his enemies: Israel COHEN, the Mad Genius of the Revolution; ACHMET the Almost-Human; Melchior Umberto GASPARD, Prince of Forgers; Professor IZAN, the Führer’s Favourite.

  David Pringle, Imaginary People: A Who’s Who of Modern Fictional Characters (1987)

  Greg and Harry Lipman met several times over the next few weeks, mainly away from the Leech building. In Soho pubs and cheap restaurants, they discussed the direction of the new Dr Shade strip. Greg had liked Harry immediately, and came to admire his still-quick storyteller’s mind. He knew he could work with this man. Having taken Dr Shade over from Donald Moncrieff, he didn’t have a creator’s obsessive attachment to the property, and was open to suggestions that would change the frame of the strip. Harry agreed that there was no point in producing a ’40s pastiche. Their Dr Shade had to be different from all the character’s previous incarnations, but still maintain some of the continuity. Gradually, their ideas came together.

  In keeping with the Argus’ stated old-but-new approach, they decided to set the strip in the near future. Everybody was already talking about the turn of the century. They would have Dr Shade come out of retirement, disenchanted with the postwar world he fought for back in the old days, and assembling a new team of adventurers to tackle up-to-the-moment villains against a backdrop of urban decay and injustice. Greg suggested pitting the avenging shadowman against rapacious property speculators laying waste to his old East End stamping grounds, a crack cartel posing as a fundamentalist religious sect, corporate despoilers of the environment, or unethical stockbrokers with mafia connections.

  ‘You know,’ Harry said one afternoon in The Posts, sipping his pint, ‘if Donald were writing these stories, Dr Shade would be on the side of those fellers. He died thinking he’d lost everything and here we are, half a century later, with a country the original Dr Shade would have been proud of.’

  Nearby, a bored mid-afternoon drinker, swallows tattooed on his neck, zapped spaceships, his beeping deathrays cutting into the piped jazz. Greg pulled open his bag of salt and vinegar crisps. ‘I don’t know much about Moncrieff. Even the reference books are pretty sketchy. What was he like?’

  ‘I didn’t really know the man, Greg. To him, Lipmans were like Cohens... not people you talked to.’

  ‘Was he really a fascist?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Harry’s eyes got a little larger. ‘Nobody had a shirt blacker than Donald Moncrieff. The whole kit and kaboodle, he had: glassy eyes, toothbrush moustache, thin blond hair. Marched through Brixton with Mosley a couple of times. Smashed up my brother’s newsagent’s shop, they did. And he went on goodwill jaunts to Spain and Germany. I believe he wrote pamphlets for the British Union of Fascists and he certainly conned poor old Frank into designing a recruiting poster for the Cause.’

  ‘Frank FitzGerald?’

  ‘Yes, your predecessor with the pencils. Frank never forgave Donald for that. During the War, the intelligence people kept interrogating Frank whenever there was a bit of suspected sabotage. You know the line in Casablanca? “Round up the usual suspects.” Well, Donald put Frank on the list of “usual suspects”.’

  The space cadet burned out. He swore and thumped the machine as it flashed its ‘Game Over’ sneer at him.

  ‘Were you brought in specifically to change Dr Shade?’

  ‘Oh yes. Badgerfield was an appeasement man
right up until Munich but he was a smart newspaper boy and saw the change in the wind. He dumped a lot of people - not just fascists, lots of pacifists got tarred with the same brush - and about-faced his editorial policy. You’d think he’d overlook the comic strip, but he didn’t. He knew it was as much a part of the Argus as the editorial pages and his own “Honest Opinion” column. My orders when I took over were quite blunt. He told me to “de-Nazify” Dr Shade.’

  ‘What happened to Moncrieff?’

  ‘Oh, he sued and sued and sued, but Badgerfield owned the character and could do what he wanted. When the War started, he became very unpopular, of course. He spent some time in one of those holiday camps they set up for Germans and Italians and sympathisers. They didn’t have much concrete on him and he came back to London. He wrote some books, I think, but couldn’t get them published. I heard he had a stack of Dr Shade stories he was never able to use because only His Lordship had the right to exploit the character. Then, he died...’

  ‘He was young, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Younger than me. It was the blitz. They tried to say he was waving a torch in the blackout for the lüftwaffe, but I reckon he was just under the wrong bomb at the wrong time. I saw him near the end and he was pretty cracked. Not at all the privileged smoothie he’d been in the ’30s. I didn’t like the feller, of course, but you had to feel sorry for him. He thought Hitler was Jesus Christ and the War just drove him off his head. Lots of Englishmen like that, there were. You don’t hear much about them these days.’

  ‘I don’t know. They all seem to be in parliament now.’

  Harry chuckled. ‘Too right, but Dr Shade’ll see to ’em, you bet, eh?’

  They raised their drinks and toasted the avenging shadow, the implacable enemy of injustice, intolerance and ill-will.

  IN PRAISE OF BRITISH HERO’S

  Those of us PROUD TO BE BRITISH know that in this nations HOUR OF DIREST NEED, the True Blue BRITISH HERO’S will appear and STAND TALL TOGETHER to WIPE FROM THE FACE OF THIS FAIR FLOWER OF A LAND those who BESMERCH IT’S PURITY. With the WHITE BRITON’S in danger of drowning under the tidal wave of COLOUREDS, and the dedicated and law-upholding BRITISH POLICE going unarmed against the SEMITEX BOMBS, OOZY MACHINE GUNS and ROCKET LAUNCHERS of the KINK-HAIRED NIGGER’S, MONEY-GRUBBING YIDS, ARSE-BANDIT AID’S-SPREADERS, SLANT-EYED KUNGFU CHINKIE’S, LONG-HAIRED HIPPY RABBLE, LOONY LEFT LESBIONS, and RAGHEADED MUSSULMEN, the time has come for KING ARTHUR to return from under the hill, for the CROSS OF ST GEORGE to fly from the banners of the CRUSADERS OF CHRISTENDOM, for ROBIN HOOD to come back from the greenwood of Avalon, for the archers of CRECY to notch up their arrows on the orders of GOOD KING HENRY THE FIFTH, for ADMIRAL HORATIO NELSON to take command of the STOUT-HEARTED FLEET, for RAJAH BROOKE OF SARAWAK to show the coons and gooks and spooks and poofs whats what, for the MURDER of GENERAL GORDON to be avenged with the blood of AY-RAB troublemakers, for DICK TURPIN to rob the JEW-INFESTED coffers of the INVADING IMMIGRANT VERMIN AND FILTH, for DR SHADE to use his airgun on the enemies of WHITE LIBERTY

  The time will come soon when all GOOD BRITISH MEN will have to dip their FISTS in PAKKYNIGGERYIDCHINKAY-RAB BLOOD to make clean for the healthy WHITE babies of our women this sacred island. The STINKING SCUM with their DOG-EATING, their DISGUSTING UNCHRISTIAN RITUAL PRACTICES, their PIG-SCREWING, CHILD-RAPING, MARRIAGE-ARRANGING, DISEASE-SPREADING habits will be thrown off the WHITE cliffs of Dover and swept out to sea as we, THE TRUE INHABITANTS OF GREAT BRITAIN, reclame the homes, the jobs, the lands and the women that are ours by DIVINE RIGHT.

  KING ARTHUR! ST GEORGE! DR SHADE!

  Today, go out and glassbottle a chinkie waiter, rapefuck a stinking coon bitch, piss burning petrol in a pakky newsagent, stick the boot to a raghead, hang a queer, shit in a sinnagog, puke on a lesbion. ITS YOUR LEGAL RIGHT! ITS YOUR DUTY! ITS YOUR DESTINY!

  ARTHUR is COMING BACK! DR SHADE WILL RETURN!

  Our’s is the RIGHT, our’s is the GLORY, our’s is the ONLY TRUE JUSTICE! We shall PREVALE!

  We are the SONS OF DR SHADE!

  ‘JOHNNY BRITISH MAN’, Britannia Rules fanzine, Issue 37, June 1991

  (Confiscated by police at a South London football fixture.)

  Harry had given him a map of the estate, but Greg still got lost. The place was one of those ’60s wastelands, concrete slabs now disfigured by layers of spray-painted hatred, odd little depressions clogged with rubbish, more than a few burned-out or derelict houses. There was loud Heavy Metal coming from somewhere, and teenagers hung about in menacing gaggles, looking at him with empty, hostile eyes as they compared tattoos or passed bottles. One group were inhaling something - glue? - from a brown paper bag. He looked at them a moment or two longer than he should have and they stared defiance. A girl whose skin haircut showed the odd bumps of her skull flashed him the V sign.

  He kept his eyes on the ground and got more lost. The numbering system of the houses was irregular and contradictory and Greg had to go round in circles for a while. He asked for directions from a pair of henna-redheaded teenage girls sitting on a wall and they just shrugged their shoulders and went back to chewing gum. One of the girls was pregnant, her swollen belly pushing through her torn T-shirt, bursting the buttons of her jeans fly.

  Greg was conscious that even his old overcoat was several degrees smarter than the norm in this area and that that might mark him as a mugging target. He also knew he had less than ten pounds on him and that frustrated muggers usually make up the difference between their expectations and their acquisitions with bare-knuckle beatings and loose teeth.

  It was a Summer evening and quite warm, but the estate had a chill all of its own. The block-shaped tiers of council flats cast odd shadows that slipped across alleyways in a manner that struck Greg as being subtly wrong, like an illustration where the perspective is off or the light sources contradictory. The graffiti wasn’t the ’80s hip-hop style he knew from his own area, elaborate signatures to absent works of art, but was bluntly, boldly blatant, embroidered only by the occasional swastika (invariably drawn the wrong way round), football club symbol or Union Jack scratch.

  CHELSEA FC FOREVER. KILL THE COONS! NF NOW. GAS THE YIDS! UP THE GUNNERS. FUCK THE IRISH MURDERERS! HELP STAMP OUT AIDS: SHOOT A POOF TODAY. And the names of bands he had read about in Searchlight, the anti-fascist paper: SKREWDRIVER, BRITISH BOYS, WHITEWASH, CRÜSADERS. There was a song lyric, magic markered on a bus stop in neat primary school writing, ‘Jump down, turn around, kick a fucking nigger. Jump down, turn around, kick him in the head. Jump down, turn around, kick a fucking nigger. Jump down, turn around, kick him till he’s dead.’

  You would have thought that the Nazis had won the War and installed a puppet Tory government. The estate could easily be a ’30s science-fiction writer’s idea of the ghetto of the future, clean-lined and featureless buildings trashed by the bubble-helmeted brownshirts of some interplanetary axis, Jews, blacks and Martians despatched to some concentration camp asteroid. This wasn’t the Jubilee Year. Nobody was even angry any more, just numbed with the endless, grinding misery of it all.

  Eventually, more or less by wandering at random, he found Harry Lipman’s flat. The bell button had been wrenched off, leaving a tuft of multi-coloured wires, and there was a reversed swastika carved into the door. Greg knocked and a light went on in the hall. Harry admitted him into the neat, small flat. Greg realised the place was fortified like a command bunker, a row of locks on the door, multiple catches on the reinforced glass windows, a burglar alarm fixed up on the wall between the gas and electricity meters. Otherwise, it was what he had expected: bookshelves everywhere, including the toilet, and a pleasantly musty clutter.

  ‘I’ve not had many people here since Becky died’ - Greg had known that Harry was a widower - ‘you must excuse the fearful mess.’

  Harry showed Greg through to the kitchen. There was an Amstrad PCW 8256 set up on the small vinyl-topped table, a stack of continuous paper in a tray on the floor feeding the printer. The room smelled sl
ightly of fried food.

  ‘I’m afraid this is where I write. It’s the only room with enough natural light for me. Besides, I like to be near the kettle and the Earl Grey.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Harry. You should see what my studio looks like. I think it used to be a coal cellar.’

  He put down his art folder and Harry made a pot of tea.

  ‘So, how’s Dr Shade coming along? I’ve made some drawings.’

  ‘Swimmingly. I’ve done a month’s worth of scripts, giving us our introductory serial. In the end, I went with the East End story as the strongest to bring the doctor back...’

  The East End Story was an idea Harry and Greg had developed in which Dr Jonathan Chambers, miraculously not a day older than he was in 1952 when he was last seen (or 1929, come to that), returns from a spell in a Tibetan Monastery (or somewhere) studying the mystic healing arts (or something) to discover that the area where he used to make his home is being taken over by Dominick Dalmas, a sinister tycoon whose sharp-suited thugs are using violence and intimidation to evict the long-time residents, among whom are several of the doctor’s old friends. Penelope Stamp, formerly a girl reporter but now a feisty old woman, is head of the Residents’ Protection Committee, and she appeals to Chambers to resume his old crime-fighting alias and to investigate Dalmas. At first reluctant, Chambers is convinced by a botched assassination attempt to put on the cloak and goggles, and it emerges that Dalmas is the head of a mysterious secret society whose nefarious schemes would provide limitless future plotlines. Dalmas would be hoping to build up a substantial powerbase in London with the long-term intention of taking over the country, if not the world. Of course, Dr Shade would thwart his plots time and again, although not without a supreme effort.

  ‘Maybe I’m just old, Greg,’ Harry said after he had shown him the scripts, ‘but this Dr Shade feels different. People said that when I took over from Donald, the strip became more appealing, with more comedy and thrills than horror and violence, but I can’t see much to laugh about in this story. It’s almost as if someone were trying to force Dr Shade to be Donald’s character, by creating a world where his monster vigilante makes more sense than my straight-arrow hero. Everything’s turned around.’