Summary
A city’s arteries hum with crackling ether as two colossal intellects—one cloaked in starched probity, the other festering in nihilistic grandeur—wage a spectral duel for dominion over the very breath of the airwaves. The Radio King, a 1922 chapter-play stitched from lightning and shadow, pits Roy Stewart’s stoic criminologist, Dr. Alan Sterling, against Albert J. Smith’s galvanic madman, Dr. Basil Vortex, whose anarchist cadre has weaponized a phantom invention: a valve that can pluck yesterday’s whispers from the sky and rewrite tomorrow. The narrative detonates inside a neon-slashed laboratory where Vortex’s voltaic trap nearly fries Sterling’s heart, leaving the detective with a death-clock of months and a bloodstream of ticking mercury. From that incandescent second onward, every cliff-hanger becomes a threnody for a man racing his own necrosis. Louise Lorraine’s daredevil stenographer, Daphne Hale, pirouettes between sabotage and devotion, piloting biplanes through storm-cells of static while Slim Whitaker’s cigar-chewing reporter, Scoop Mallory, file copy mid-gunfight, his typewriter keys clacking like rivets in the hull of a sinking world. Episodes unspool across rooftop pagodas, subterranean dynamo shrines, and pirate vessels that trail antennae like cathedral spires, each locale drenched in cobalt nitrate nocturnes. The serial’s true protagonist, however, is the voiceless ether itself—an oceanic void that remembers every treason, every murmured vow, and now disgorges them as sonic ghosts. When the final reel collapses into a maelstrom of spark-gaps and heartbreak, the victor is left clutching not justice but a lacquered funeral urn filled with the echoes of a world that already sounds obsolete.
Synopsis
This serial deals with the attempt of a master detective, a man of science, to overcome an equally brilliant inventor who is a criminal and whose warped mind caused him to seek to overthrow society, his genius making him the leader of a band of anarchists. The action hinges on the fight of these two for the possession of a secret invention by which radio messages may be recalled from the air. The success of the criminal right at the start succeeds in nearly electrocuting the detective so that he has only a few months to live.
