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!
The grisly trail of pillage, plunder and death led straight to Public Enemy Number X! Who was this desperate foe of the law? The only man who could answer that question wore a mask! But even The Phantom Detective might not survive long enough to learn the terrible truth behind this bloodiest of crime waves!
Although other characters also had multiple writers, there may be reasons that so many contributed to the Phantom Detective. It is well known that multiple stories within the Phantom Detective series were originally intended for other characters but, for whatever reasons, were rewritten into Phantom Detective entries. It may be, however, that the number of authors for this particular series relates not only to its longevity, but also to The Phantom Detective being more or less a straightforward lawman, albeit in a mask. Other Pulp heroes took on lost races, psychotic madmen with plots to litter the streets of New York with thousands of bodies, or mysterious monsters and insane mad scientists. The Phantom Detective usually steered clear of such outlandish threats and focused more specifically on street level crimes, be it actual crimes against citizens or massive underworld plots to rob the world blind. This more realistic take on a Pulp hero may have made the character easier for multiple authors to either write stories from beginning to end, or even to take tales they were already writing and simply rework them to fit as a Phantom Detective adventure. Regardless, the accessibility of the series made sure that Phantom Detective fans had 170 stories to read from a fantastic variety of authors.
‘Murder Cracks Down’ was originally published in the November 1935 issue of The Phantom Detective Magazine and is read with pulse pounding intensity by award winning voice actor Milton Bagby.
