Title: Murder Before the Storm
Air date: October 10, 1954
Plot summary: The Seacliff Inn isn't doing very well. Three separate times, guests of the inn have taken the hazardous cliffside path from the inn to the town, and fallen to their deaths on the rocks below. The bad publicity has hurt business, and the inn is about to go under.
Andy Walton, owner of the Seacliff Inn, calls his friend Lamont Cranston. Lamont assumes that Andy thinks that the deaths on the cliff weren't accidents, but he never gets the chance to ask Andy directly. Just as Lamont and Margot arrive, Andy is found dead on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. Who killed him? Was it Captain Zeb, the clam digger who runs a souvenir shop despite loathing tourists? Or was it Greg Tyler, the hotel clerk, who has been rejected by Captain Zeb's pretty niece Rita?
Note: This episode is lost, as is almost every episode over the last six seasons of the show, 1949-1954. But a script survives, and is the basis for this recap.
Tropes:
- As You Know: When Rita says that Captain Zeb won't like how Greg has been chasing after her, Greg answers "I'm not afraid of your uncle," filling in the viewers on Rita and Zeb's relation.
- Frame-Up: Greg Tyler attempts to frame Captain Zeb for the murder of Andy Walton by dropping one of the buttons from Zeb's pea coat next to the corpse.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Greg Tyler has been in the habit of pushing hotel guests who venture onto the cliff path.
- A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: Alluded to by Lamont, who says that three deaths in the same manner in the same season "could be a riddle wrapped in the enigma of murder, to misquote Winston Churchill."
- Sleeping Single: Naturally, Lamont and Margot ask for two rooms at the Seacliff Inn.
- Villainous Breakdown: Greg Tyler, who thinks that The Shadow isn't real and that he must be hallucinating, breaks down sobbing at the end and confesses everything.
