Title: The Hospital Murders
Air date: August 14, 1938
Plot summary: Lamont Cranston and his "loyal friend" Margo Lane are on vacation together in Egypt when Lamont is approached by his old friend Dr. Rawling, who is now in charge of Cairo General Hospital. People are disappearing from Cairo General! Three patients, in fact, have disappeared without a trace. Lamont makes the common-sense suggestion to call the police, but Dr. Rawling feels the bad publicity that would come down on Cairo General for, well, losing patients, and begs Lamont for help.
Dr. Rawling in fact is teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, fearing that something supernatural is going on. His boss, hospital administrator Dr. Krueger, attempts to reassure him that there must be some rational explanation, but matters aren't helped when a fourth patient disappears. Lamont discovers that there is a rational explanation when they find the orderly who was supposed to be on guard, out on the fire escape, dead with a knife in his neck. Lamont decides to dangle Margo Lane out as bait, by having her fake a car accident and get admitted to Cairo General.
Sure enough, Margo is kidnapped by a deranged villain—Dr. Krueger! Luckily for Margo, The Shadow followed her and Dr. Krueger to Krueger's lair.
Tropes:
- Busman's Holiday: Margo is actually a little miffed when her and Lamont's vacation to Egypt turns into them chasing bad guys again. Lamont says he was bored.
- By the Lights of Their Eyes: The Shadow, who can cloud men's minds to make himself invisible, decides to un-cloud his eyes only, so he can hypnotize Dr. Kruger. Dr. Kruger is pretty surprised to see two gleaming eyes floating in space and staring at him.
- Evil Cripple: Dr. Kruger, it turns out, is missing a leg! He used to be called "peg-leg" and "limpy", and this has driven him mad, and now he is doing appalling body graft experiments and killing his victims when he's done.
- Hypnotic Eyes: The Shadow uses his glowing hypnotic stare to hypnotize Dr. Kruger into dropping his knife and not chopping up the unfortunate sailor on his table.
- Laughing Mad: Dr. Krueger does a lot of insane cackling after he's unmasked.
- Mad Scientist: Dr. Krueger has invented a magic serum which allows him to graft one person's body part onto another's. He naturally decides to start kidnapping people, after which he chops them up and switches legs around.
- Missing White Woman Syndrome: Stated pretty much directly by Dr. Rawling. The previous kidnap victims were Disposable Vagrants and a black sailor from a ship that made port, but this last victim is the 16-year-old daughter of the French consul. Dr. Rawling actually says "That's what makes it so horrible!"
- You No Take Candle: The black sailor who regains consciousness on Dr. Krueger's operating table, sees Krueger coming at him with a knife, and says "White man! What you do?"
