Here was the premise of a re-imagined Shadow that me and my brothers were thinking. It would take place in the 1920's, and Lamont Cranston is a psychiatrist in New York City. One night Cranston comes home and discovers that his home has been broken into, and his wife has been brutally murdered. Cranston soon discovers that the killer is still in the apartment, and suffers a near fatal blow to the head from his wife's killer. With a permanent head injury that could potentially claim his life if he recieves another blow to the head, Cranston travels to the Orient to do some soul searching. While in Japan he meets an aging Ninjitsu master, who decides to train Cranston before he dies. Since Cranston's head injury makes hand to hand combat too dangerous, the master instead focuses on teaching him the arts of illusion and escape. I know, it's a bit like Batman Begins, but work with me here. Although Cranston is still not much of a fighter, his training allows him to be virtually invisible, meaning that fighting will not be necessary.
When Cranston returns to new york, he decides to use his newfound abilities to perform a long term study on the criminal mind, and get to the bottom of why people become criminals. In order to do this, he prowls the streets at night, bringing criminals to justice as he psychologically observes and experiments on them. Calling himself "the Shadow," he convinces criminals that he is a vengeful ghost who will not sleep until every criminal is gone from New York. Meanwhile though, a brilliant but corrupt detective starts to catch wiff of the Shadow's trail, and tries to uncover the reality behind the ghost stories, making himself an expert on The Shadow's trickery in hopes of eventually catching him.
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