In the annals of pulp crime fighting, one name stands out from the rest: The Shadow. With 325 adventures on the stands and in our hearts, The Shadow was the first and in the opinion of many, the best of the pulp heroes. In the matter of longevity, The Lone Wolf came in second with 212 issues; Lone Wolf appeared in the magazine TEXAS RANGERS. Third was Doc Savage, who, like The Shadow, is still selling reprint editions of his 181 books.
Odds are that unless you’re a pulp fan, you’ve never heard of The Lone Wolf or the character known as The Phantom Detective, who was second to come along chronologically after The Shadow and enjoyed a run of 170 issues. That’s a lot of ink devoted to a single hero.
Like The Shadow and Doc Savage, The Phantom Detective is currently back in print. For a number of years now, his stories have been a staple of Adventure House’s pulp replica publishing business, with reprints coming out at the rate of six or more a year. Does wealthy man about town Richard Curtis van Loan, aka The Phantom, deserve rediscovery? Does The Shadow laugh at frightened criminals?
The Phantom’s true identity is known to only one person: newspaper publisher Frank Havens. When Havens sees that The Phantom is needed by law enforcement agencies, he turns on a red light at the top of the newspaper building, a gimmick that foreshadows the Bat-Signal. The Phantom shows up wearing a top hat and domino mask — one of those small ones that just frame the eyes — and flashes his special I.D. so the police will know who he is. Unlike The Shadow, The Spider, et al, The Phantom works with the cops, who appreciate his help.
In the August 1935 issue of THE PHANTOM DETECTIVE, THE PHAROAH’S MASK — “pharoah” is misspelled that way on the cover, but not in the interior — the mystery involves the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh that returns to life whenever there is someone in the Egyptian Room of the New York Museum who needs to be killed. A ghostly mark appears on the back of each victim’s hand.
It’s been said that The Phantom would have made a terrific character for movie serials, but it never happened. The novel is loaded with gun battles, car chases, inexplicable sliding panels and more sinister doings than any self-respecting king of Egypt could shake a scepter at. This kind of creepy mystery was hot stuff in the early 1930s, as any fan of Charlie Chan movies will tell you.
The novels of the Phantom were credited to “Robert Wallace,” a house name designed to make readers think of Edgar Wallace, the immensely popular Brit thriller writer best remembered today as one of the creators of King Kong. A gag in the pulp business was that anyone and everyone had, at one time or another, gotten paid to write a Phantom Detective novel, so I can’t tell you who came up with this one. The prose is workmanlike. The settings tend to have lots of atmosphere, but they’re not particularly atmospheric. The book is like an early ‘30s movie melodrama — an entertaining one, but not a good one.
The main novel is backed up by five short stories, none of which feature The Phantom. One is about a clever jewel robbery caper that includes a talking bird; one is about a fake ring and a murder staged to look like suicide; one is about a curse on a stone from ancient Mexico. The other two are about 10 pages long.
Honestly, I haven’t read enough PHANTOM DETECTIVE issues to know whether or not this is a good example of the series, but it went down quick and smooth, and I’m now primed for more. Perhaps that’s recommendation enough. —Doug Bentin
Related posts:
- Showcase Presents The Phantom Stranger: Volume 1
- Super-Detective Flip Book: Two Complete Novels
- Showcase Presents The Phantom Stranger: Volume 2
- Stone Rain
- The Occult Detective
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Although The Shadow was my favorite, I enjoyed the Phantom Detective also. This particular novel was written by Norman Daniels, who eventually wrote the Man From A.P.E. and Baron of Hong Kong spy thrillers in the 1960s paperbacks. He also wrote most of the Black Bat pulp stories. There was a serial thinly based on the Phantom Detective, it was The Black Widow from 1947. The publisher of the Daily Clarion calls in a special detective to investigate the spider murders, and is assisted by the star reporter for the newspaper.
Tom, thanks for the clarification. If you other bookgasm loyalists don’t know Tom’s work, click on his name above to go to his webpage. dgb
Thanks, Doug. Altus Press will publish The Phantom Detective Companion shortly, which is a history of the Phantom Detective pulp. Will Murray joined me in researching the series for author identification. Plus, Altus Press is including the complete PD comics from Thrilling Comics. This is going to be a huge book, and has synopsis on all of the stories, plus a few rejected and unpublished stories.
The one that interests me most of all the above you mention is The Lone Wolf, and I’m not even sure I ever read any of those novels. Maybe I’m remembering the movies starring Warren William as the title character. At any rate, I hesitate to imagine that the private detective in my just-published hard-boiled private eye novel THE FOREVER GIRL ISBN # 1606939932 will ever be able to join The Phantom Detective or Doc Savage or Bulldog Drummond or any of those great strugglers against crime, but all we can do is struggle to put them out there and try.