The Banshee Murders 1-1-1946

There's a séance being held by Madame Mathilda. Lamont is there, and so is Police Commissioner Weston. The police are investigating her, believing she is running a scam.

Margo is with Lamont. Outside the house, a policeman sees and hears someone that he thinks is a banshee, and shortly thereafter someone tries to knife Margo when she's outside.

Later, Margo means Ronjan, a strange inventor.

The story about the treasure is covered, and Lamont, as The Shadow, investigates some strange blinking form of signals. Then there's a race between the Shadow and a man named Phil to follow some crooks. There's encounters with phantom cabs, real and fake leopards, and a strange woman in a horse-drawn cab.

There's a reference to Margo being jealous over Lamont. Lamont gives Margo a long explanation of how a guy was abducted and two identical cabs were involved, and how that was done. (Shouldn't this type of thing have been kept a mystery until nearer the end of the story?)

Phil has been involved, in a way, with a woman named Arlene, and now Arlene is going to be working for Ronjan who knows Lamont.

Burbank is brought into the story, deciphering a coded message and relaying it to the agents of the Shadow and to Cranston himself. Hawkeye, Harry Vincent and Clyde Burke are the agents that are involved.

There's a fight later between Phil, a guy, and a vampire bat. There are also some “carrier bats”, like carrier pigeons.

In Central Park, the story reveals how one woman posed as the Banshee and was able to fool people into thinking she was a real Banshee. Margo and two other women are captured by the leopard-men.

The climatic scene takes place in an under-ground grotto, where the main evil-doer confronts the people who were kidnapped, reveals that he has the actual treasure there, then is upset by Ronjan's appearance. A battle takes place involving them plus the leopard men, the Shadow, and the Shadow's agents. Everything is explained, including how the Shadow knew there was an underground grotto underneath a gravestone.

I think the story is somewhat uneven in quality. I don't think having Margo in the story works very well, and I think too many things get explained to easily and too quickly, Margo generally being used as the person to explain things to. This is also, though, one of the latter of the Shadow stories, #299 out of 325, so that might account for its somewhat lesser quality than early stories.


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