Forged in war, The Phantom Detective wages a one-man battle on crime! Solving impossible mysteries and delivering his own justice, he is the underworld’s masked nightmare!
A sinister scar of fiendish doom brands the grisly corpses of brutally murdered men as the Avenger, cloaked in mystery and armed with death, swoops down upon terrified victims. When such a figure of evil arises, only one man can dare to stand up to him - The Phantom Detective!
Entire essays have been written and countless arguments have ignited over just how much various comic and movie heroes actually owe to the Pulp creations before them. With the Phantom Detective, however, the comparisons between Ned Pines’ master sleuth and another, much more popular masked detective, Batman, are hard to deny. Although not in the same manner, both Richard Curtis Van Loan and Bruce Wayne were orphans and both men born to wealth. Also both characters underwent vigorous training in various skills, although it appears that The Phantom Detective was somewhat more self educated than Batman, Even with that, both were skilled fighters, masters of disguise and escape, and of course each held a claim to being the world’s greatest detective. The Phantom Detective also maintained a crime laboratory, keeping it a secret, much like Batman did with his Batcave. Above all else, however, the clearest connection between them rests in the fact that The Phantom’s friend, publisher Frank Havens, had a red flashing light installed atop his newspaper building to use as a signal to summon his masked friend. This, obviously, predates Batman’s own Bat Signal, but even more glaring is the fact that two men responsible for editing Batman at his earliest stages of development had previously been editors on a particular Pulp magazine The Phantom Detective!
‘Written in Blood’ was originally published in the May 1935 issue of The Phantom Detective Magazine and is read with pulse pounding intensity by award winning voice actor Milton Bagby.
