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!
Two flaming corpses, doomed pawns in a daring killer’s game, are hurled into the midst of a throng of Manhattan merrymakers — and catapult The Phantom into action as he embarks on one of his most exciting manhunts.
It is not unusual for experts and fans to draw comparisons between Pulp heroes and characters that followed them. With the Phantom Detective, however, the comparisons between Ned Pines’ master sleuth and another, much more popular masked detective are hard to deny, even if the other debuted in comic books. It would be difficult for anyone to say that Batman did not at least owe a bit of debt to The Phantom Detective. 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. Both were skilled fighters and criminologists, 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 greatest evidence that The Phantom Detective contributed to the development of Batman 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 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!
‘The Broadway Murders’ was originally published in the August 1938 issue of The Phantom Detective Magazine and is read with pulse pounding intensity by award winning voice actor Milton Bagby.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Burned on Broadway
Chapter 2: A Finger of Steel
Chapter 3: Voice from Nowhere
Chapter 4: Fire Strikes Again
Chapter 5: Hate of an Actor
Chapter 6: A New Actor Appears
Chapter 7: The River of Fire
Chapter 8: John Dolan’s Madness
Chapter 9: Note from the Night
Chapter 10: Baiting a Trap
Chapter 11: Another “Phantom”
Chapter 12: Mad Brute at Large
Chapter 13: Living “Dead Men”
Chapter 14: Teeth Tell A Story
Chapter 15: Death of A “Phantom”
Chapter 16: The Fire Boss Strikes
Chapter 17: A Deer Can Kill
Chapter 18: Menace By Radio
Chapter 19: The Doubt of Loder
Chapter 20: In Their Own Trap
Chapter 21: Out of the Fog
