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 drops into the middle of mystery and intrigue at Smith Island — and follows a grim trail of blackmail and peril that challenges his keen crime-fighting power!
The Phantom Detective has a history which includes something that makes him somewhat unique amongst most pulp heroes. It may be no surprise since the magazine was published for twenty years, give or take, but several of the stories that made their way into the magazine as Phantom Detective stories did not begin that way. Due perhaps to the number of authors involved in penning tales of The Phantom Detective, it is a well-known fact that multiple stories now in the character’s canon actually began as stories, or at least ideas for other characters. When a story starring a character didn’t sell, it wasn’t uncommon for that tale to be rewritten as a Phantom Detective story and find itself published. The reasons for this phenomenon, though it did happen to lesser degrees in other Pulp Hero magazines, may be several. At its core, The Phantom Detective is a very basic concept, a man driven by boredom and lack of purpose to fight against crime and evil. With that being the template, almost any character could be adjusted with the addition of a mask and, in some cases, a powering down of strength or mystical skills to become The Phantom Detective. Also, it may simply have been dictated by necessity. In order to keep a series going that did not have a regular author behind it, Thrilling Publications may very well have taken rejected tales written for other characters and accepted the reworked stories for The Phantom Detective.
The Thousand Island Murders was originally published in the August 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: Devil’s Fire
Chapter 2: Bearded Faces
Chapter 3: Vanished Corpse
Chapter 4: Green Light Calls
Chapter 5: Body in the Ice
Chapter 6: Chip Bites Death
Chapter 7: The Vanishing Man
Chapter 8: Long John Smith
Chapter 9: Floating Corpses
Chapter 10: Fear in Men’s Eyes
Chapter 11: Strange Attack
Chapter 12: Hunters of Smiths
Chapter 13: Double Surprise
Chapter 14: One Girl Must Die
Chapter 15: New Danny Smith
Chapter 16: Strange Red Devil
Chapter 17: Ice Death Reaches
Chapter 18: The Phantom’s Light
Chapter 19: Stubborn Red Bill
Chapter 20: Death to Take All
Chapter 21: A Voice of Doom
Chapter 22: Long John’s Story
