Walter B. Gibson

Walter Brown Gibson was born on September 12, 1897, in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Alfred Cornelius Gibson (1849–1931) and May Morrell Whidden Gibson (1863–1941). Gibson graduated from Colgate University in 1920 where he was a brother of Delta Kappa Epsilon, and began working "for newspapers in his native Philadelphia as a reporter and crossword-puzzle writer," specifically for The North American, and later The Evening Ledger. In 1923–1924, he provided illustrated single-page articles for Science and Invention magazine describing various tricks and puzzles. In 1927, he founded and edited the pulp magazine Tales of Magic and Mystery, which ran for five issues, ending in April 1928. In 1928 Gibson was asked by Macfadden Publications to edit True Strange Stories; he did, for a time, identified as Walter Scofield, commuting back and forth to New York. In 1931, after submitting some crime stories for Detective Story Magazine, he was asked by publishers Street & Smith to produce the first print adventure of The Shadow, who at that stage was merely a voice, the mysterious narrator of the Street & Smith-sponsored Detective Stories radio drama. It was Gibson who created all the mythos and characterization of The Shadow, including his alter ego of wealthy playboy Lamont Cranston. ==The Shadow==

The popularity of the radio show's narrator inspired the show's sponsors (Street & Smith) to translate the character into print, and Gibson was duly asked to produce 75,000 words for the first quarterly issue of The Shadow pulp magazine. Gibson ultimately contributed more than 15,000,000 words towards Shadow publications. Similarly, Shadow companion Margo Lane arose not from the pulp novels but from the radio program; she was added to offer a contrasting female voice to the show's audience. In 1941 Gibson grudgingly added Margo Lane to the pulp stories, and even hinted at her having a power of invisibility. ==Magic, non-fiction, and other works==

Gibson wrote more than a hundred books on magic, psychic phenomena, true crime, mysteries, rope knots, yoga, hypnotism, and games. He served as a ghost writer for books on magic and spiritualism by Harry Houdini, of the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Under the pen name Andy Adams, Gibson is credited with writing at least five of the twelve novels in the Biff Brewster juvenile adventure and mystery series for adolescent boys: Brazilian Gold Mine Mystery, Mystery of the Mexican Treasure, Mystery of the Ambush in India, Egyptian Scarab Mystery, and Mystery of the Alpine Pass. In the 1920s, Gibson wrote two books on numerology for the publisher George Sully & Co. With his wife Litzka R. Gibson (née Gonser Litzka wrote her own books on topics as diverse as palmistry, dancing, and personal hygiene, sometimes under the pen-name Leona Lehman. Gibson wrote a Batman prose story which appeared in Detective Comics #500 (March 1981) and was drawn by Thomas Yeates. Gibson also ghosted the novelization of the Preston Sturges screenplay The Sin of Harold Diddlebock under the by-line of popular humorist Harry Hershfield. Hershfield had been commissioned to write the novel, but stalled out in the first chapter. Gibson was engaged to write it in his stead, and the adaptive prose is actually his, from start to finish. ==Appearances and tributes in fiction==

He is a featured character in the Paul Malmont novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 2006, and in the sequel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown (Simon & Schuster 2011). In addition, Gibson is the protagonist, along with actor Orson Welles, in a historical mystery by Max Allan Collins, The War of the Worlds Murder, published by Berkley Books in 2005. In the Dynamite Entertainment miniseries The Shadow: Year One by Matt Wagner, a reporter appears on more than one occasion throughout the story's progress, investigating most of the appearances of The Shadow and its connection with Lamont Cranston (Allard, who had in fact changed his identity with Cranston's). At the end of the story we are shown that the reporter is called Maxwell Grant. Although it is not an appearance of Gibson as such, it is indeed a reference and tribute to his work in the novels when Grant talks of trying to document part of the adventures of The Shadow. While not appearing directly, in P. N. Elrod's Bloodlist, Jack Fleming mentions that he knows the author of the Shadow Magazine, and when he comes across a mobster guard reading Terror Island thinks to himself that he will "have to write to Walter and tell him about his mobster fan." ==References==