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 ruthless human fiend weaves a sinister pattern of grim murder and grisly horror, a puzzle that only the world’s greatest sleuth can solve! Yet The Phantom Detective faces evil as even he has never imagined as he moves from body to body, clue to clue, and ever deeper into mind numbing horror!
With the end of his magazine in 1953, The Phantom Detective seemed to drop out of circulation literally and out of the minds of fans. His longest lasting impact actually comes from two conventions within his twenty year run of stories. The only person to know The Phantom Detective’s true identity was Frank Havens. Keeper of this knowledge since the first story, Havens, as publisher of the city’s newspaper, often assisted The Phantom Detective with his cases, even acting as the one requesting his unique help, often at the behest of law enforcement. To summon the masked man, Havens had a red light installed atop the Clarion Building, one that would shine when the Phantom Detective was needed. This is definitely a precursor and most likely the inspiration for a much more famous signal that debuted in comics years later. It isn’t really a leap to connect Batman’s Bat Signal to the Phantom’s Clarion beacon. Two of the editors in the early days of Batman actually cut their teeth editing The Phantom Detective. Another impact, one that was more immediate on some of his Pulp counterparts, like The Spider, was the fact that The Phantom Detective carried a calling card of sorts as an identifier. To prove he was in fact the real Phantom Detective, he would show a badge of platinum fashioned into the shape of a domino mask.
‘Master of the Damned’ was originally published in the April 1935 issue of The Phantom Detective Magazine and is read with pulse pounding intensity by award winning voice actor Milton Bagby.
