Heroes: Always In Style

Not that I want to say anything negative about literary critics, but it often seems that they ought to either shut up or take a healthy swig of reality. The ever-widening gap between what they revere and what people actually read would, you might think, give them pause but, in love with their own pedantry, they continue foundering in their sea of exclusionary hype.

There can be no better example of this than "Tree of Smoke," the new novel by Denis Johnson, which has had long, prominent, and glowing reviews that have been impossible to avoid. Big ads, too, and front-of-the-store promotion in all the chains. Who's read it? Reviewers. It is impenetrable, disjointed, confusing, structurally inept, and filled with characters as well-defined as phantasms. The fact that he admitted in an interview that he didn't care if his books made sense suggests that he and I share a point of view.

It has been like this for a long time, and my diatribe (I mean, my observation) was brought to the fore when I picked up a couple of reprints of "Shadow" novels, "Road of Crime" and "Crooks Go Straight" (Nostalgia Ventures, 128 pages, $12.95) and "The City of Doom" and "The Fifth Face" (Nostalgia Ventures, 128 pages, $12.95), written by Walter B. Gibson under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant.

The first "Shadow" novel was published in the eponymous pulp magazine in 1931. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature that year was "Years of Grace" by Margaret Ayer Barnes. Yes, I know. I've never heard of her, nor read her book, either. More than three-quarters of a century later, though, people are still reading the Shadow's adventures.

This was not a 1931 fluke: The winner the previous year was Oliver La Farge's "Laughing Boy," and Julia Peterkin's "Scarlet Sister Mary" won the year before that. None of these favorites of the literary establishment have approached the staying power of their contemporary pulp fiction writers — an eloquent negation of the significance of the academics and critics who relentlessly chastise the American reading public for preferring the storytelling qualities of their inferiors.

I'm not suggesting that there is any pretension of literary excellence to the "Shadow" novels, nor was there meant to be. Walter Gibson averaged a million words a year for more than 20 years. If he delivered one Shadow manuscript at noon, he had a dozen pages of the next one written before nightfall. He wanted to provide action, excitement, and adventure to his readers, because that's what they wanted.

The abilities of "Shadow" hero Kent Allard (not Lamont Cranston, merely one of Allard's aliases), mainly learned in Tibet, were neither realistic nor shared by his readers. His capacity to "cloud men's minds," thus rendering himself invisible, came in handy when battling a throng of thugs. Guns in both hands, he could wipe out a platoon of pirates within seconds. These minions of mastermind criminals were eliminated without hesitation or remorse, and his readers loved it.

Evidently, they still do, as these volumes are the 10th and 11th in the reprint series. These aren't books that get reviewed by literary journals, nor is Oprah likely to praise their sensitivity. No, they are bought because readers — guess what? — want to read them. As Harlan Ellison writes in his predictably entertaining introduction, the inspired stories of the Shadow are "popular culture lit you should pray you never outgrow."

The opening scene of "The City of Doom" is a breathless recounting of an apparent accident in a mill, which results in a mammoth ladle of molten steel spilling and flooding the floor, catching up innocent workers in its merciless path. The Shadow has come to the city as he recognizes that a similar series of killer events are not accidents at all, but part of a plan by the evil Voodoo Master.

In "The Fifth Face," readers know where they stand once they hear the names of the "leeches" as they are introduced: Grease Rickel, Banker Dreeb, Clip Zelber, and Jake Smarley — as explicit and lacking in subtlety as Dickens at his peak.

If you'd like to be seen as the hippest kid on the block, pick up Denis Johnson. If you want to have some fun, make it one of the Shadow books. It's 76 years after his debut, and he's still successfully fighting both crime and boredom.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories. He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.