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 Phantom Detective pits himself against The Lynx, sinister fiend of crime, when a great war industry city is threatened with grim doom and destruction! The world’s greatest sleuth tackles a mystery that menaces the entire nation!

 

The Phantom Detective’s stories have been described by some as inconsistent, shifting from one style of storytelling to another tale to tale. Although this obviously can be contributed to the ever-changing authors, it also bears to realize that this may have been somewhat intentional on the parts of the editors. Even though he was the second Pulp Hero to debut after The Shadow started the trend, it did indeed become commonplace for other Pulp publishers to follow with their own version of Hero Pulps. Many of these, such as Doc Savage and the Spider, settled into a routine, a basic story structure that, while readers returned issue after issue for some of the characters, never changed from the start to the ending of the series. This was the standard pattern for most Hero Pulps and likely a reason that many such magazines only lasted a handful of issues.

 

The Phantom Detective stories brought in new writers after the twelfth issue, writers allowed to basically write in their own styles. Over its twenty-year run, the series saw The Phantom Detective take on street level crime and also sometimes tackle monstrous, seemingly supernatural evils, even though these were written more realistically. The fact that the magazine ran two decades shows that readers responded to the shifting tone of storytelling that was standard for the series, always returning never knowing if their hero would be facing a man with a gun…or a monster with a death ray!

 

Murder Money was originally published in the April 1943 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: A Costly Error

Chapter 2: Pawn of Death

Chapter 3: Crime’s Golden Opportunity

Chapter 4: A Halved Hundred Grand

Chapter 5: The Deviltry Begins

Chapter 6: Call for the Phantom

Chapter 7: Checked Hatred

Chapter 8: “The Next Mayor”

Chapter 9: A Clean Sweep that Failed

Chapter 10: War to the Death

Chapter 11: Well of Murder

Chapter 12: Underground Prison

Chapter 13: On the Trail

Chapter 14: The Cryptic Message

Chapter 15: Missing Papers

Chapter 16: Blackmail!

Chapter 17: Tommy-Gun Ravage

Chapter 18: Out of the Past

Chapter 19: Mysterious Blonde

Chapter 20: The End of the Trail

Chapter 21: The Woman Pays