Max Collins: The War of the Worlds Murder

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 .

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 childhood, 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.

After all, a writer couldn’t sell a story he hadn’t written. So Gibson’s motto was: Write till it hurts; then write some more .

As he rode through Manhattan in the back of a Yellow Cab, wraithed in his own cigarette smoke, Gibson sat with a small valise on the floor and his portable Corona typewriter on the seat next to him, a rider as important as himself-at least.

With his salt-and-pepper hair neatly combed back, his round-lensed wire-frame spectacles, his oval face with the regular, intelligent features, he looked more like a lawyer or a businessman than the master of intrigue who dispatched the cloaked avenger known as the Shadow to take on campaigns against crime (any time he visited New York, he only half-consciously scouted locations for such gangster tales), and to bring down world-domination-minded masterminds like the Voodoo Master and Shiwan Khan.

He’d come down this morning by train from Maine-his home was in Philly, but he and Jewel had a cabin up north, on Little Sebago Lake, where they were spending more and more of their time. No stranger to Manhattan, he and his wife had lived in an apartment on West 46 thfor about a year, so he could be closer to the editorial offices of Street and Smith.

But he’d found the city distracting, too many plays and movies and restaurants to tempt a writer away from work; plus he was spending not nearly enough time with his son Robert (who lived with first wife Charlotte). Returning to Philadelphia and then building the cabin in Maine had made seeing Bobby more practical; the boy had been summering with his father and stepmother these past several years.

The cabin provided a kind of knotty-pine womb for Gibson’s ideas to grow within. He would sit at a large pinewood desk in a corner of the central room with its vaulted ceilings, chain-smoking (cigarettes his chief stress reliever) and dreaming up yarns. No phone was allowed (calls came in to the cabin next door, where his cousin Eaton lived) with the silence punctuated only by the calls of loons and other birds out on the lake.