My initial interpretation of that comment was the poster thought the stories sucked but in clarifying later, he explained that those stories had already been reprinted plenty of times and are still accessible now, so why bother?
Fair point. To that end, I've completed a little project that I've been meaning to get to for some time; a page to assist those looking for the original stories.
The "Reprint Resource" page is at the top right, just under the banner. For now it includes the three publishers (that I'm aware of) actively reproducing the material, being Altus Press, Adventure House and Sanctum Books.
It was a fun exercise and I learned a few things while doing it.
- I was surprised to find that aside from the Brand Of The Black Bat origin, no other story has been reprinted by all three publishers. It's just a matter of time until that changes, however, as each continues to add to its respective catalog. Still, I expected a bit more overlap.
- There are two stories called The Murder Prophet. I don't know how the hell I didn't pick up on this before since both covers are on the Black Book Detective page. The first, from 1942, was not written by Black Bat creator and primary author Norman Daniels but the second, from 1947, was. At first I wondered if the earlier story had simply been used a second time but evidently not. Judging from the brief synopsis in The Black Bat Companion, they are vastly different tales with an identical title. Strange.
- While it may seem like the majority of the Black Book Detective stories have been reprinted, these three publishers combine for about half of them. The last dozen or so have yet to be made available.
For now we'll focus on these three publishers and ignore prior attempts that are only available on ebay and such. So if you want to collect the stories in original order of release, or as quickly as possible, or with a certain type of additional material included, that page should assist you in building a strategy to do so.
