I recently managed to acquire two more original Black Book Detective novels including the Summer 1946 issue which features the Black Bat story The Survivor Murders.
The book's premise is interesting from the get-go. A plane crashes in a field killing most of the people on board. Then someone starts killing off the survivor.
Most of those survivors all seem rather ordinary and harmless. There's a stewardess, a school teacher, a florist and a recently-married young couple...Why would anyone want these people dead?
One passenger was a mob lawyer who rambled on deliriously as he lay dying. Is someone trying to ensure that none of the secrets he might have blurted out go any further than that field?
Overall it's a decent little mystery. I do believe that most readers will pick up on which characters are the most likely murder suspects but perhaps struggle to connect all the dots until the very end.
That end, incidentally, feels a little rushed, as if author Norman Daniels realized that he was near his maximum word count and had to wrap things up.
If you feel that the notion that pulp heroes need to be surrounded by a team of assistants is tedious and tired, then this is the book for you. Carol Baldwin fans will be disappointed in this one as her role is very limited and Silk is written out fairly early. Butch becomes a bigger part of the story in the second half.
Otherwise, the bulk of the heavy lifting is done by our favourite bat-themed hero teamed up with police officer McGrath, though McGrath is somewhat dull in this one. You could substitute any generic cop character in his place and hardly notice. There's no real attempt by McGrath to discover the Black Bat's identity, for example. They're working towards the same goal throughout.
This is still a very good entry in the Black Bat collection and came a hair shy of being included on the "Recommended Reading" page. It would have made it if the supporting cast had been more heavily used or, in McGrath's case, perhaps not so watered down.
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