Out of the night comes a menacing winged figure! Blind district attorney Tony Quinn takes his battle for justice from the courtrooms to the streets, battling evil as The Black Bat!
When a city is rocked by a wave of juvenile delinquency, Tony Quinn moves in to stem the tide and ferret out the sinister evil leading youth into the pathways of crime!
When The Black Bat debuted, the concept of the Pulp hero had not already been established, it had also become somewhat of a stereotype. The Pulp hero was usually male, wealthy, usually fought with a team or a group of allies and took on power mad insane villains. The Black Bat hit most of these tropes, some of them like the figurative dead horse, dead on, which was necessary for a series character in this vein to survive. What was different, though, about the majority of The Black Bat stories themselves was that they were not simply excuses for explosions and adventure. A real mystery was often hidden at the core of each tale of Tony Quinn’s crime fighting career.
The most grandiose part of any Black Bat adventure was the masked avenger himself. The stories were closer to traditional detective mysteries than a lot of other pulp tales. Norman A. Daniels, one of the hardest working and most experienced authors in Pulp magazines, brought his skill of writing and his knowledge of crafting mysteries fully to The Black Bat. Tony Quinn, a lawyer by vocation, utilized skills he’d learned in his career and even beyond that to become a true detective, each story often starting with an unknown assailant or even a crime shrouded in secrecy. Even though bullets flew and punches were thrown, there was more often than not a solid ‘whodunit’ or ‘what’s going on’ at the basis of each story and The Black Bat would do the reveal of the culprit in his own explosive way.
Thrill to Murder’s Playground, originally published in Black Book Detective #85 May 1949 and read with two fisted excitement by award winning voice actor Milton Bagby.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Cop Kill
Chapter 2: Quinn Breaks the News
Chapter 3: Background for Crime
Chapter 4: Walter Cooperates
Chapter 5: The Man in Black
Chapter 6: The Clan Meets
Chapter 7: Getaway Money
Chapter 8: Dead Killer
Chapter 9: Young and Tough
Chapter 10: Gun Merchant
Chapter 11: Crook’s Lawyer
Chapter 12: Strange Bedfellows
Chapter 13: The Murder of a Crook
Chapter 14: House of Fun — and Death
Chapter 15: Butch Lands One
Chapter 16: Black Bat’s Trick
Chapter 17: Men of Murder?
Chapter 18: The Plague of Crime
Chapter 19: Trap for an Enemy
Chapter 20: The Black Bat at Bay
Chapter 21: The Big Job
Chapter 22: Millions from Murder
