By Debra K. Every 
Forget the lumbering brute. Seriously. In a stroke of genius that feels long overdue, author Teel James Glenn resurrects Mary Shelley’s classic creature not as a monster, but as the most compelling hardboiled detective of the 1930s. A Walking Shadow, the second Shamus Award-nominated entry in the Paradise Investigations series, plants its flag firmly in uncharted territory. In this brilliant Gothic noir, the shadow of Dashiell Hammett falls hard on the legacy of Victor Frankenstein.. In this brilliant Gothic noir,
The result is pure alchemy.
This isn’t a simple pastiche; it’s a full-throated, thought-provoking genre mashup that pits the articulate, philosophical Adam Paradise against a New York City teeming with gangsters, vengeful Tongs, and entities from Japanese folklore. He’s a walking contradiction, a patchwork man seeking his own humanity in a world hell-bent on proving its own inhumanity. Critics like Bruce Robert Coffin are already hailing it as “one of the finest literary mashups of our time,” and it’s easy to see why. The novel moves with a relentless, pulpy energy, yet it’s all grounded in a surprising emotional core, a detective who knows more about what it means to be human than the humans he’s trying to save.
So, does this bold experiment in alchemy work? Can a 200-year-old creature truly hold his own in a fedora and a trench coat?
Let’s open that glass-front office door and find out.
A Walking Shadow by Teel James Glenn: Frankenstein’s Monster is the Hardboiled PI We Needed
A Horror Book Review by Debra K. Every
Teel James Glenn is back with the second installment of his Paradise Investigations Series. Book One in the series, Not Born of Woman, was nominated for a well-deserved Shamus Award (review in the December 2024 issue of Ginger Nuts of Horror). In A Walking Shadow, Glenn continues his focus on the creature from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.And its release couldn’t be more perfect, coming just before Guillermo de Toro’s newest film, Frankenstein. Hard to imagine that an eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley could have penned a novel that still inspires.
In the second installment of this genre-bending series, Glenn’s depiction of Frankenstein’s “creature” is one we have rarely, if ever, seen. A thinking, feeling man with a mastery of languages and a breadth of knowledge in both literature and philosophy. The series picks up where Shelley left off. Her novel was set in the 1700s and when we last saw the creature, he was drifting away on an ice raft in the middle of the arctic after his creator, Victor Frankenstein, had died. The creature was devastated by the death and ashamed of his own actions, determined to die on a burning funeral pyre. It leads one to wonder what is next in store. Glenn answers that question deftly.
He sets his Paradise Investigation Series two hundred years later in 1930s Manhattan. The creature is now a private investigator who has set up shop in a classic noir office that would have made Dashiell Hammett proud: glass-fronted door; blinds on the windows; the works. A noir office deserves a noir name and Glenn does not disappoint. Adam Paradise. The name is apt. Adam: first man. Paradise: from Paradise Lost, a novel he loves. It establishes, from the start, that this is no lumbering, grunting lump of flesh.
Adam Paradise believes he was “born an abomination and a crime against nature”. He is massive, scarred, and yes, did terrible things many years before. But he is now determined to make amends; to champion the vulnerable and avoid violence whenever possible. His new friends have come to depend on him—something he has never experienced. He will do anything to protect them.
This is a different Adam Paradise from Book One. In Not Born of Woman, Paradise was a man alone, determined to avoid relationships of any kind. It took a young Romani woman to show him that he was valued and accepted. Paradise learned that there were people willing to accept him for who/what he was. His new friends gave him hope, not only for his future but for mankind in general.
The characters in Book One make an encore appearance in A Walking Shadow, most notably Vandoma Kalderash, a Romani woman acting as part assistant/part mother hen, and shopkeeper, Digger, who delights in trading quotes with Paradise from obscure books as a contest of both his and Paradise’s literary prowess. Added to these are gangsters, tough cops, frightening entities from Japanese folklore and tales of the place “beyond”.
It is clear that Glenn knows his history and is keen to weave the uncertain days before World War II into this book. Paradise catches wind of a history-altering event that will thrust the Unites States into war. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I’ll leave it at that. I will say, however, that Glenn cleverly gives us a pulp fiction detective novel living side-by-side with spirits, evil entities, and the realm beyond.
Throughout it all, Adam Paradise shows us what it means to be human. Articulate, well-read, philosophical, and saddened by the inhumanity of man, he takes comfort in the friends he has gathered, proving that there is hope.
Teel James Glenn has clearly delved into the work of Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane, but also Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edgar Allen Poe. He couples those sensibilities with a clear understanding of history and a gift for combining it into a thought-provoking, entertaining book. The writing is evocative. The pacing is brisk. And the story can’t be put down. I look forward to more in this series.
A Walking Shadow: 2 (Paradise Investigations) by Teel James Glenn (Author), Lissanne Lake (Illustrator)
It is the year 1939 and Adam Paradise, the creature of the Frankenstein legend made real, has returned to civilization to discover his place in the world.
While enjoying a pleasant evening of moviegoing in Chinatown with his friend Hank, they end up in the middle of a brazen robbery.
Adam thwarts the holdup, which puts him on the hit list of not only the Tongs, but Yakuza killers, the Italian mob, and a mysterious mastermind bent on starting an ethnic gang war.
With his faithful Roma secretary, Vandoma Kalderash, he and Hank are soon plunged into a whirlwind of ambushes and deadly double-crosses.
The patchwork private eye also discovers a level of reality beyond the material world that shakes the foundations of all his beliefs.
Can he defeat the unseen forces of this evil without losing the very humanity he’s trying to attain? And who—or what—is Daitengu, a creature that knows his deepest secrets?
“Teel James Glenn has penned one of the finest literary mashups of our time. Part Hammett, part Shelley, and all heart. A Walking Shadow is a wholly unique take on the PI mystery genre, so well written it will leave you longing for the next installment in this Shamus nominated series. Brilliant!” —Bruce Robert Coffin, bestselling author of Crimson Thaw
“This marvelous genre mashup was a fun read from beginning to end. Frankenstein’s monster – true to the book, not the movies, is presented as a 1930s hardboiled detective written in a tight, strong pulp style. Elements of Eastern mysticism blend smoothly with the sci-fi character in this sweet detective soup in a suspenseful story that pulls you through the action to a satisfying finish that left me eager for a sequel.” —Austin Camacho, author of eight novels in the Hannibal Jones Mystery Series, five in the Stark and O’Brien adventure series and short stories featured in the Edgar nominated African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study
“A Walking Shadow is compelling, exciting, yet deeply thoughtful. Teel James Glenn asks important questions about the human condition by giving us characters whom we care about—and one of the most human is Frankenstein’s monster. Glenn weaves an action-packed story through multiple genres and ethnicities with care and respect. Jump on board. You won’t regret it!” —Carol Gyzander, Bram Stoker Award® winner and World Fantasy Award finalist
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