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 tackles a grim mystery of stolen jewels and disappearing men! Follow the Ace of Sleuths as he tracks down the elusive overlord of crime known only as “The Snatcher.”
The Phantom Detective was created primarily because of the first Pulp hero to hit the magazine stands, The Shadow. Had Street and Smith not hit upon publishing gold by adapting the eponymous voice hosting an anthology radio show to the printed page, Richard Curtis Van Loan may very well have not come into existence. The incredible success and popularity of The Shadow Magazine, however, made it inevitable that other publishing houses were going to come after their piece of the pulp pie, and Thrilling Publications would be no different. Their task, though, was two-fold, to beat every other publisher to the newsstand with their own take on the Pulp hero and to make sure that their character was similar enough to The Shadow to be a hit, but not so similar that it was simply The Shadow under another name. Based on its long publishing history and continued popularity with fans today, it seems that Thrilling succeeded in doing just that with The Phantom Detective Magazine.
Readers wanted characters they could have something in common with, and they found this more in The Phantom Detective than The Shadow. Even though part of the escapism was that Richard Curtis Van Loan had more money than he would ever need, leaving him with none of the issues his readers had, they wanted someone to relate to on some level and Van Loan’s listlessness upon returning home from the War provided that necessary hook to make many readers fans of the Phantom Detective.
The Trail to death was originally published in the May 1941 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: Vanishing Men
Chapter 2: The Second Coffin
Chapter 3: Ambush!
Chapter 4: Death in the Shaft
Chapter 5: Invitation to a Corpse
Chapter 6: Loot!
Chapter 7: At Bay
Chapter 8: Diamonds Are Trumps
Chapter 9: A Job for Chip
Chapter 10: Flaming Death
Chapter 11: Steve and Muriel
Chapter 12: The Curved Line
Chapter 13: Voices from the Grave!
Chapter 14: Perilous Masquerade!
Chapter 15: Burial!
Chapter 16: The Next Victim
Chapter 17: Into Thin Air
Chapter 18: Railroad Adventure
Chapter 19: Last Haul
Chapter 20: The Snatcher
