Last fall, I took a chance and bought a Kindle version of a German Black Bat story, Blutgeld (Blood Money). I wrote a bit about it here. I was able to read it with an auto-translating extension to Google Chrome which enabled me to quickly flip the text from German to English.
I can't say Blutgeld blew my mind but I appreciated that writer Angelika Schröder seemed to get all the appealing aspects of the Black Bat character and his entourage right. I soon purchased another book by Schröder, entitled The Wrong Victim.
I even hate to bring that one up because its title is actually a spoiler. As soon as you are made aware of the crime that the Black Bat is tasked with investigating, the title comes to mind and you immediately know what the outcome will be. It's just a matter of being entertained while the characters figure it out.
Still, it was the better of the two stories, I thought, and any praise I might have for Mrs. Schröder's knowledge and meticulous usage of the character's most interesting traits were still applicable.
Schwekendiek is a veteran writer but doesn't have the character nailed to the degree that Schröder did, in my opinion. I am nearly at the halfway point of this book and we are just now getting hints that Tony Quinn will be making use of his Black Bat persona. Butch O'Leary has barely been mentioned.
The most glaring inconsistency with the original material is that interactions with McGrath feel off. McGrath will address Quinn as "sir" on occasion, like a subordinate would, which I don't believe took place a great deal in the original stories. If my memory is sound, he even does so with Silk Kirby at some point in this story.
When a disagreement about the handling of a murder investigation flares up, Quinn goes off on McGrath with far more venom than I was used to reading. At one point, Quinn goes as far as forbidding McGrath from following a certain course of action as a detective. Schwekendiek pushed to the extremes the relationship between the two men who, at the end of the day, are just seeking justice in their own way and they each know this. An appearance by Commissioner Jerome Warner is quite welcomed, on the other hand.
Also, while this is hardly something I can drop at Mrs. Schwekendiek's feet, the auto-translate tool seemed to struggle with her first chapter but has since settled in. I'm not sure why it rebelled against the German text initially but to be fair, perhaps the translation affects the delivery of the story.
Early original Black Bat stories often included a weird (though eventually debunked) mystical or supernatural aspect. "The Dead", written around a superstition that an artist's sculptures are coming to life and killing people at night, would probably fit better among those earlier tales than the latter ones which tended to be more straightforward murder mysteries or involve the theft of large sums.
In summary, the writing is not necessarily poor but the grasp of the character and the features that make him interesting appears to be lacking at the halfway point of this story.
