Meet The Phantom Detective

When it comes to long-running hero pulps, The Phantom Detective is brought up. The magazine has the distinction of outliving both The Shadow and Doc Savage pulps by several years.  Tho he only had 170 issues, less then Doc or certainly The Shadow.

Published by Ned Pine‘s Thrilling Publications, The Phantom Detective was the second hero pulp, coming out in March 1933 before Doc Savage. When the pulps featuring The Shadow and Doc Savage ended in 1949, The Phantom Detective was able to hold on until 1953, outliving Thrilling’s The Black Bat, who appeared in Black Book Detective by a few months.

But many find the character a little dull, which affects many of the Thrilling pulp heroes.

His authorship is also muddled. The first 11 issues were credited to G. Wayman Jones, and it’s thought this was really D.L. Champion, aka Jack D’Arcy. And in a rare case, the rest were published under the pseudonym Robert Wallace. The Wallace name hid over a dozen different authors, including Norman Daniels and various others who wrote hero pulps. A lack of records and the fact that Thrilling often had their editors do revamping work makes it hard to identify who did what.

But who was The Phantom Detective? Well, first off, in the stories he was called just “The Phantom.” In what has become a stereotype for many pulp and comic book heroes, he was a bored, rich playboy Richard Curtis Van Loam who turned his attention to being a vigilante detective. A WWI veteran fighter pilot, he trained himself as a master of forensics, disguise, and the like.

He worked with his father’s friend, Frank Haven, who ran the Clarion newspaper that he owned. In a later story, Haven adds a red light on the top of the Clarion building to signal The Phantom, a forerunner of the “Bat Signal.” Muriel Haven was the love interest, and there are others that assisted him.

As is usual with most of the Thrilling pulp heroes, while his identity is unknown, he was widely respected by police, as he was more a freelance detective helping them solve crimes than a masked vigilante taking the law into his own hands. He even carried a jeweled platinum badge in the form of a domino mask as a means to identify himself. The covers, again like many of the Thrilling hero pulps, had a domino-masked Phantom watching over the action. For many, their visual idea of The Phantom is a tuxedo-wearing hero in top hat and domino mask, when in most cases he operated in disguise, more like Secret Agent X.

But, sadly, again like most of the Thrilling heroes, there were no larger-than-life villains, and his stories are seen as less thrilling, so not as memorable.

Reprints and new stories

There have been several attempts at reprints of The Phantom, but none have done a complete job. In 1965 and ’66, Regency, a soft-porn book publisher, reprinted several pulp heroes under the imprint Corinth, which included 22 Phantom Detective stories. More recently Sanctum Books started a reprint series, but only got two volumes out, each with two novels. Since then, Adventure House has started a replica reprint series, having put out over 120 novels.

For new stories, Wildside Press has put out two novels set after the pulp stories. And Airship 27 has put out one collection of new short stories. The character has also appeared in various other New Pulp works.

For those wanting to know more about the character, they should check out the excellent The Phantom Detective Companion by Tom Johnson and others from Altus Press.

Comics

As I’ve previously noted, Ned Pines, in addition to his pulp magazine line, also had a comicbook line known as Nedor Comics by most. Like most pulp publishers with associated comicbook lines, The Phantom also appeared in these comics, though called both The Phantom Detective and The Phantom. These stories appeared in Thrilling Comics and America’s Best Comics. A reprinter of public-domain comics, Gwandaland Comics, has put out a complete collection of these comics, which I’ll be reviewing separately.

If you are interested in checking out this character, there are several options with both new and original works. I hope to delve more into this character sometime in the future, and will post further on him.