Set in 1933, the story details the conflict between the two pulp magazine icons during a crime wave caused by a murderous kidnapping-extortion ring led by the mysterious criminal mastermind known as the Funeral Director.

He does not wear a mask or any disguise while invisible, and so in episodes such as "The Temple Bells of Neban" he is cautious when he meets an enemy who could potentially disrupt his hypnotic abilities, exposing his true face and instantly making him a visible target for attack.

Allard falsifies his death by crash landing his plane in Guatemala, encountering the indigenous "Xinca tribe" as a result, who see him as a supernatural being and provide him with two loyal aides.

As the vigilante called The Shadow, Allard hunts down and often violently confronts criminals, armed with Colt .45 pistols and sometimes using magician tricks to convince his prey that he's supernatural.

One such trick is “The Devil's Whisper”, a chemical compound on the thumb and forefinger, causing a flash of bright flame and sharp explosion when he snaps his fingers.

As Cranston, The Shadow often attends the Cobalt Club, an exclusive restaurant and lounge catering to the wealthy, and associates with New York City Police Commissioner Ralph Weston.

In addition, the villain King Kauger from the Shadow story Wizard of Crime is the unseen mastermind behind the events of Intimidation, Inc., and the organization known as The Silent Seven was referenced in the previous title The Death Tower.

The series featured a myriad of one-shot villains including: The Golden Vulture, Malmordo, The Red Blot, The Black Falcon, The Cobra, Five-Face, Li Hoang, Velma Thane, Quetzal, Judge Lawless, The Gray Ghost, The Silver Skull, Gaspard Zemba, Thade the Death Giver, Kwa the Living Joss, Mox, and The Green Terror.

In addition to The Hand and The Silent Seven, The Shadow also battled other one-shot collectives of criminals, including The Hydra, The Green Hoods, The White Skulls, The Five Chameleons, and The Salamanders.

[5] Following a brief tenure as narrator of Street & Smith's Detective Story Hour, "The Shadow" character was used to host segments of The Blue Coal Radio Revue, airing on Sundays at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

While functioning as a narrator of The Blue Coal Radio Revue, the character was recycled by Street & Smith in October 1931, for its newly created Love Story Hour.

Contrary to dozens of encyclopedias, published reference guides, and even Walter Gibson himself, The Shadow never served as narrator of Love Story Hour.

Frank Readick Jr. again played the role of the sinister-voiced host on Mondays and Wednesdays, both at 6:30 p.m., with La Curto taking occasional turns as the title character.

The series disappeared from CBS airwaves on March 27, 1935, due to Street & Smith's insistence that the radio storyteller be completely replaced by the master crime-fighter described in Walter B. Gibson's ongoing pulps.

Street & Smith entered into a new broadcasting agreement with Blue Coal in 1937, and that summer Gibson teamed with scriptwriter Edward Hale Bierstadt to develop the new series.

He sometimes openly shows compassion for his enemies, even at time criticizing society for creating circumstances that lead to certain crimes and cause some people to lose hope and support.

The radio drama also introduced Margo Lane (played by Agnes Moorehead, among others) as Cranston's love interest, crime-solving partner, and the only person who knows his identity as The Shadow.

Her sudden, unexplained appearance in the pulps annoyed readers and generated a flurry of hate mail printed on The Shadow Magazine's letters page.

The name itself was originally inspired by Margot Stevenson,[20] the Broadway ingénue who would later be chosen to voice Lane opposite Welles's The Shadow during "the 1938 Goodrich summer season of the radio drama.

In issue #2 (Sept. 1964), the character changed into a campy, heavily muscled superhero in a green and blue costume by writer Robert Bernstein and artist John Rosenberger.

Emulating DC's earlier team-up, Dark Horse also published a two-issue miniseries in 1995 called The Shadow and Doc Savage: The Case of the Shrieking Skeletons.

In 1931 and 1932, Bryan Foy Productions created[34] and Universal Pictures distributed[35] a series of six film shorts based on the popular Detective Story Hour radio program, narrated by The Shadow.

Lamont Granston (as his name was spelled in both opening credits and a newspaper article) assumes the secret identity of "The Shadow" in order to thwart an attempted robbery at an attorney's office.

In this version, reporter Lamont Cranston (despite being spelled Granston in the previous film) is an amateur criminologist and detective who uses the name of "The Shadow" as a radio gimmick.

In the film, the evil Shiwan Khan is an admirer of Ying-Ko who later also becomes a student of the Tulku, learning the same powers of illusion and telepathy but never reforming or regretting his murderous ways.

"[citation needed] The film also displays a first: Cranston's ability to conjure the illusion of a false face whenever he is in his guise as The Shadow, giving him an appearance similar to the character's physical portrayal in the pulp magazines and comics.

[43][44] On December 11, 2006, the website SuperHero Hype reported that director Sam Raimi and Michael Uslan would co-produce a new Shadow film for Columbia Pictures.

[50] Finger then used "Partners of Peril"[51] – a Shadow pulp written by Theodore Tinsley – as the basis for Batman's debut story, "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate".

Alan Moore has credited The Shadow as one of the key influences for the creation of V, the title character in his DC Comics miniseries V for Vendetta,[57][58] which later became a Warner Bros. feature film released in 2006.

[citation needed] The 2015 video game Fallout 4 includes a quest series centered on a character called "the Silver Shroud," a crime-fighting detective from old-world radio shows.