I’ve written in the past about the Shadow having his partner Margo Lane impersonate a reporter from time to time, but now I have found a Shadow episode in which Margo actually does take on a writing assignment.

It’s not hardcore news reporting of the Lois Lane variety, but a feature story for a women’s magazine, at least at first.

But when the society family Margo is about to profile turns out to have nasty secrets, the tale becomes what the chroniclers of The Shadow call “The Dragon’s Tongue Murders,” broadcast in 1941 and stored away as an MP3 file in the library of the Old Time Radio Researchers group, OTRR.org. (Click on the episode title to download the MP3 if the player icon below does not work properly.)

A fan also has posted the episode to YouTube, under the name of one of the pulp-magazine Shadow’s secret identities…

Back to Margo as reporter… In fact, I’ve read somewhere that the creators of the Superman comic strip took the name of Lois Lane from both Margo Lane and Lola Lane, one of the actresses who played the fiesty reporter Torchy Blane on a series of B-movies in the 1930s.

In a way, this Shadow episode is like the early Superman adventures on radio. The “reporting assignment” is what gets Margo Lane and Lamont Cranston to the peculiar family’s estate, before any crime has occurred. Then they get caught up in the mystery, and Cranston has to shift into his superhero role, at least briefly. That is reminiscent of some of the Superman radio serials, where Clark Kent and Lois Lane — as reporters — were the center of the plot for days of 15-minute episodes before Kent had to do anything superhuman.

Perhaps to get Shadow fans interested, the broadcast begins with a preamble about the family’s dark secrets, with the voice of the Shadow in a role I haven’t heard before — as an omniscient narrator. Then we jump to Margo and Lamont on their way to the estate. (In the car, Lamont, whom we and Margot know as the Shadow, has no knowledge of the events in that spoken preamble.)

According to a search for The Shadow in J. David Goldin’s RadioGoldindex listing of old-time radio show episodes and casts, William Johnstone played The Shadow for this one, and Marjorie Anderson was Margo Lane.

As for Margo’s story, it certainly doesn’t turn out the way she planned. But despite the multiple murders mentioned in the title, our freelance writer heroine does have her own somewhat happier surprise ending.

I recall reading that the Shadow was originally a mysterious sounding narrator who did not actually appear in the stories. That was before he evolved into a crime fighter with the ability to cloud men’s minds etc. I wonder if that opening scene with the shadowy voice over this was an homage to the early days, or an early transitional script being reused.

Now that I have listened to the and written this much about it, I’m going to dust off my copy of Martin Grams’ book about the Shadow, as well as a couple of other radio reference books to to refresh my memory about Shadow history and see if they shed any light on this particular episode.