Who is Kent Allard?

Here’s big, big, very big news for fans of The Shadow. The August 8, 1937, pulp novel “The Shadow Unmasks,” by Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant), has finally, for the first time ever, been reprinted, complete with its original art. This is the notorious story that rocked the pulp magazine world when it revealed once and for all the true identity of The Shadow. For six years, Gibson had told readers that Lamont Cranston was just one of the crime-fighter’s public faces, a disguise The Shadow adopted only when the real world-traveling Cranston was out of town. So who was The Shadow really? He turned out to be aviator-adventurer Kent Allard, WWI aviator hero and adventurer, thought lost in Central America. This was a very cool revelation in its day, I imagine, and it’s great to be able to read the story for the first time. “The Shadow Unmasks” is paired up with “The Yellow Band” in The Shadow Vol. 15, part of Nostalgia Ventures’ terrific pulp reprint series. The volume also includes bonus articles about the famous Shadow “identity reveal” and a short bio of Colonel P. H. Fawcett, the explorer who inspired Gibson’s creation of Kent Allard.

Amazon claims the book is not yet available, but I found it at my local Borders last Friday.