Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The Shadow knows!

The Shadow (1937-1954) aired “The Black Buddha” on September 4, 1938.  Though only about 300 episodes are known to still exist out of over 800 (depending on how one counts), the number is subject to change as new episodes are unearthed from time to time. Out of the just over three dozen episodes of The Shadow  we’ve run since 2009, this is the first since April of 2023, a year and a half ago, so I felt it was time for another for The Shadow has proven quite popular with Golden Age radio fans, and especially fans of the Shadow in both radio and magazine formats.

The following is an abridged account of the character’s radio and magazine history for those coming to The Shadow for the first time. Long-time listeners may have forgotten some of the details, so if you are among them, refresh your memories or take a moment to grab your favorite beverage of choice before listening to this episode.

The history of the Shadow character is long and storied. A bare bones synopsis begins on July 3, 1930 when the narrator of magazine publisher Street & Smith’s radio version of its pulp magazine, Detective Story Magazine, was given the name of The Shadow. This mysterious voice who merely introduced and narrated the radio show, but was not a character in any of the episodes, became so popular after it was taken over by Frank Readick, Jr. and his spooky, phantom laugh that on April 1, 1931 The Shadow magazine was born. It ran for 325 issues, 282 of them written by Walter B. Gibson (1897-1985) under the house name of Maxwell Grant.

The Shadow debuted on radio on September 26, 1937 and delighted fans for more than seventeen years, closing shop on December 26, 1954. The radio show began its long run on the Mutual Broadcasting Network on Sunday evenings and was sponsored by Blue Coal. From its inception until just past its first year (Sept., 1937-Sept., 1938) the voice of the young 22-year-old Orson Welles (1915-1985) would be heard as that of the Shadow, and Agnes Moorehead (1900-1974, photo at left) would play the role of “the lovely Margot Lane,” his “faithful companion” and aide. Following Welles’s departure (“Professor X” was his final episode) Bill Johnstone (1908-1996) became the Shadow for the September 25th, 1938 episode, at the beginning of Season Two. He was then succeeded by Bret Morrison (1912-1978), who, in two stints (1943-44 & 1945-54), was radio’s the Shadow for ten of its seventeen years (though others besides these three mainstays would ascend to the role). Moorehead would also exit the show (in 1940) to follow Welles after he formed his Mercury Theater on the Air, as well as appear in several of the young genius’s classic films. That said, Moorehead would take a break (March to September of 1938) during the second season, at which time the more than capable Margot Stevenson (1912-2011, photo at right) would assume the role of Margot Lane.

To arrest possible confusion arising from seeming inconsistencies between the print and radio versions of The Shadow it is important to note the following differences (though there are others):

The original print version of the Shadow portrayed him without any powers at all; he was a shadowy figure of the darkness, a cunning sleuth dedicated to overthrowing evil wherever he found it. It wasn’t until the radio version came along that he was imbued “with the power to cloud men’s minds” from a secret he learned in the Orient.

In The Shadow novels, Miss Lane’s first name was spelled Margo; for radio it was Margot.

In The Shadow novels, Margo Lane was not aware of the Shadow’s secret identity; for the radio scripts she was the only one who did know his secret identity.

In the magazine, the Shadow’s primary alter-ego was (eventually) revealed as that of Kent Allard; his radio alter-ego was Lamont Cranston.

“The Black Buddha” is the tale of a figurine residing in a curiosity shop that is sold in error without the supposed owner’s knowledge. When the powerful owner of the small statue learns of his prized figurine’s disappearance he sets out to reclaim his property with the single unwavering desire to let nothing stand in his way, including the lives of others if necessary. The Shadow gets wind of the search and the serious and possibly deadly harm it is bound to bring to others, and the game is then afoot for the whereabouts of the little Oriental figurine where a curse may be involved, or is the Buddha simply worth a lot more for some unknown reason than some let on, and if so,  how much is enough to countenance murder? Learning the secret of “The Black Buddha” is the name of the game here. A solid effort and worth a listen.

The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. –The Shadow

(The CD at top left includes this episode and 17 others on 9 discs, all digitally remastered.)

Play Time: 29:28

{Airing on a late Sunday afternoon in early September of 1938, the neighborhood gang could hardly wait until after school the next day (one of the first of the new school year and looked upon with mixed emotions by the gang) until they could meet at the nearby newsstand and find some reading more along the lines of “The Black Buddha” than what the teachers had assigned them to read. Black Mask (1920-51) started out publishing a variety of stories, including but not limited to romance, western, adventure, horror, and detective. When new editor Larry Shaw took over in 1926 the emphasis gradually drifted more toward the detective story, and from September 1929 to January 1930 it even serialized what would become a future classic with Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Over time Black Mask, according to one respected source, was regarded as “the finest detective pulp magazine ever published.” From the magazine’s June 1933 cover forward it dropped any mention of other genres being published as the detective story was the one now filling its pages, and the iconic Black Mask title remained alone atop the magazine’s covers until its demise. It was a monthly in 1938. Detective Yarns (1938-57) was but the first of what would be eight titles the magazine would sport, among the others was Black Hood Detective, Crack Detective, and Famous Detective. It wasn’t heralded as a major player in the detective field, so maybe the name changes were merely a marketing ploy to make new readers think it was a different magazine from one of its other titles they had previously tried. The magazine titled as Detective Yarns ran from June 1938 through April of 1941, and the issue below was the second of what appeared to be an attempt at 3 quarterly issues in 1938. Thrilling Wonder Stories (1936-55) was one of three early science fiction pulps that came to be thought of as cut from the same general bolt of cloth, in that it, Planet Stories, and Startling Stories didn’t hew closely to scientific accuracy and instead concentrated on colorful, action-oriented tales full of sometimes outlandish plots in service of wildly imaginative stories on other worlds, and usually with a scantily clad female somewhere on the cover. Many a favorite author would pen what would become a classic adventure story within TWS‘s pages, with many of them reprinted over and over down the decades in eagerly sought paperbacks that became popular in the 1950s. TWS was a bi-monthly in 1938.}

[Left: Black Mask, 9/38 – Center: Detective Yarns, 9/38 – Right: Thrilling Wonder Stories, 8/38]

To view the entire list of weekly Old Time Radio episodes at Tangent Online, click here.