The book gets off to a quick start. A gentleman named Gallaway comes to visit special district attorney Tony Quinn at the latter's office. Gallaway has spent years and large sums of money attempting to rid the city of crime. He now believes that there have been two attempts on his life and that there will be more. He hands Quinn an envelope containing the name of the person he believes will murder him, as well as the motive behind the attempts, but does not want the envelope opened until he is killed, should that come to pass.
Naturally, Quinn is intrigued and believes that if the man will not give Anthony Quinn more information, perhaps he will be more willing to do so for...The Black Bat!!
And that's all covered just in chapter one!
Sure enough Gallaway is killed in short order and the Black Bat and his team are on the case. The matter is further complicated in that the person named in Gallaway's envelope seems to have a very solid alibi.
A few things stood out in this story.
One of the Black Bat's aides is not entirely on board with the team's perception of the primary suspect. It doesn't reach the point of conflict within the little crime-fighting club but it raises an eyebrow nonetheless. Disagreement within the team is something I've rarely, if ever, seen in the original Black Bat material. Normally, the Tony Quinn/Black Bat, Carol Baldwin, Silk Kirby and Butch O'Leary team are all on the same page with little hesitation or doubt.
Also...we meet Captain McGrath's wife! She even has a line of dialogue or two! She has been mentioned numerous times but always seemed to be visiting a relative out of town or some such whenever the Black Bat dropped by McGrath's unexpectedly. I thought she had never appeared in-story.
Finally, writer Norman Daniels did a nice job with an action scene around the middle portion of the story. As more original material was acquired, it came to light that not all of Daniels' action scenes needed to be shootouts or fist fights. Sometimes, the Black Bat may be trying to find his way out of a burning building, or perhaps he's involved in a car chase.
In this book, the Bat needs to escape a battle on a ferry on a foggy night. Daniels does very well in describing the challenges caused by the water, the cold, etc, faced by the character. And while the Black Bat can normally see in darkness, fog is another matter.
The only area in which I might criticize the story is in its lack of a true mystery. You may not know exactly how Gallaway's murder (and other illegal activity) went down, but you do get a sense early on of who is responsible for it. That aside, Murder Maker pretty well hits all the right notes.
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