A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Evaluate
by Invoice Pronzini
WALTER GIBSON – Norgil the Magician. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1977.
Certainly one of this century’s most prolific writers, Walter Gibson was the creator of 282 pulp novels that includes essentially the most well-known of all superhero crime fighters, Lamont Cranston, a.okay.a. the Shadow. All 282 of these book-length works have been produced between 1931 and 1949 and first appeared in The Shadow Journal below such titles as “The Shadow Laughs,” “The Mobsmen on the Spot,” “The Creeping Dying,” “The Voodoo Grasp,” and “The Shadow, The Hawk, and The Cranium.”
Some forty of those have been reprinted over time, most in paperback; just a few of the shorter ones have appeared in pairs in such Doubleday hardcover titles as The Shadow: The Masks of Mephisto and Homicide by Magic (1975) and within the latest Mysterious Press e-book The Shadow and the Golden Grasp (1984).
Gibson additionally created one other collection character for the pulps — Norgil the Magician, whose adventures appeared within the journal Crime Busters within the late Nineteen Thirties and early Nineteen Forties. Norgil is a stage magician: “Like Blackstone or Calvert, each headliners on the time,” Gibson writes in his introduction to Norgil the Magician, the primary of two Norgil collections, “he might swap from fifty-minute exhibits at film homes to a full night extravaganza, with an enlarged firm.”
Norgil is an anagram of the conjurer’s actual title. Loring; he can also (and does) change it into Ling Ro, a reputation he makes use of “when known as upon to carry out wizardry in Chinese language costume.”
Every of the Norgil tales encompasses a well-known stage phantasm as its central plot gadget — a model of Houdini’s Hindu Needle Trick in “Norgil — Magician”; burial alive in a sealed casket in “The Glass Field”; the rising-card phantasm in “Battle of Magic.”
These eight tales are pulpy, to make certain (the prose virtually embarrassingly dangerous in locations), however that shouldn’t spoil most readers· enjoyment of them. The magic in every is genuine and introduced with the requisite quantity thriller — Gibson was himself a training magician — and Norgil’ s melodramatic strategies and illusions make for good enjoyable.
Anybody who has learn and loved any of the Shadow novels will definitely need to learn this assortment, as properly its successor, Norgil: Extra Tales of Prestidigitation ( 1978).
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Invoice Pronzini & Marcia Muller and revealed by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Field, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Household Belief.
