31 Deadly Guns

My reading of original Black Bat material continues with 31 Deadly Guns from January 1949 (cover date).  It was the character's 50th published story and it's a pretty good one, though many of the elements that made the early stories interesting are not present.

Shortly after making an urgent phone call to Tony Quinn to arrange a meeting, a prominent politician named Victor Dermont is shot dead on the courthouse steps. The shooter, named Ernie Ward, is apprehended but he is expected to succumb to a terminal disease in a short amount of time.

Tony Quinn believes that Ward was put up to to the task of killing Dermont and wants to track down who pulled the strings before the case dies along with the uncooperative shooter. There are, of course, several people with a variety of motives to investigate.

An interesting aspect of Ward's character is that Quinn knows him from one of his first cases as a young lawyer starting out. Black Bat stories, at least those penned by Norman A. Daniels, often to appear to be written in "real time". Tony Quinn is said to have worked Ward's case 13 years prior which would put us in 1936, prior to Quinn being a young district attorney that would become the Black bat in 1939.

Among the Black Bat's crew, Silk Kirby is the only one to be featured. Carol Baldwin and Butch O'Leary have only small roles. McGrath is present but very much working with the Black Bat rather than trying to apprehend him. I believe that by this far into the series, that was the norm. Still, it does feel like something is missing but overall this was an entertaining read.