Die Schwarze Fledermaus: Power-E-Book #1

Blitz Verlag continues to be a great friend to fans of The Black Bat who can read German. They have over 60 of the character's stories published currently, mixing of the Black Book Detective classics with some newer material, and eight more on the way next April.

While checking out their website for news, I also came upon the cover below. 

As the top banner explains, this is a compilation of four Black Bat stories, but available in e-book format only. It collects the first four that Blitz-Verlag published as a series. Those include BBD originals Brand of The Black Bat, Murder Calls The Black Bat, and The Black Bat Strikes Again, as well as a recent tale by Angelika Schroder called "Ein Harmloser Fall". I believe Schroder's story was first published in 2014.

The art is by Mario Heyer, a frequent contributor to Blitz's cover art, and the book can be purchased from Amazon.

The Dead Are Not Silent

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.

I was curious about other interpretations though so I tried another story from further down the line entitled The Dead Are Not Silent. This one was written by Margret Schwekendiek and published by Blitz-Verlag in 2015. 

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.

Blutgeld

It may be a little while until I'm able to acquire another one of the Black Bat's original stories from Black Book Detective, and I certainly can't count on any new material being made available any time soon, so I've taken the plunge and bought the Kindle version of one of the character's original stories published in Germany.

Blutgeld, which translates to "Blood Money", is not one of the many novels published in Germany throughout the 60s and early 70s. It was released in 2008. Publisher Blitz-Verlag has reprinted many of the original Black Book Detective stories but also released three original ones. This is the first of the latter.

I've located a Google Chrome extension which auto-copies what I've highlighted from the story into Google Translate so I can flip large chunks of the book at a time from German to English. I was skeptical about my chances of being able to follow the story using that method, and it makes for clunky reading on occasion, but a few chapters in, I'm able to keep up just fine.

The "A.S." in "A.S. Jones" on the cover image at right stands for Angelika Schröder. I am not far into the story yet (about a fifth of the way in), but to this point, Mrs. Schröder has it pretty well nailed down. The elements that make the character and his stories enjoyable all appear to be there; his three-person crew, McGrath's suspicious assistance, the secret lab, etc. It would seem that she has included some of the features sometimes found in the German books as well, such as Carol Baldwin's red Volkswagen and Butch's Indian motorcycle.

This came as no surprise after I spotted Nico Mathies' name as editor. Dr. Mathies (I believe that is the correct honorific for him) manages the rather incredible Schwarze Fledermaus website so he knows the character inside and out. He also contributed to the Black Bat Companion book published by what is now Steeger Books back in 2011.

Blitz has also reprinted some of the books from the 60s and I'll probably devour one of them after this one, though I haven't heard many great things about those. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy some Blood Money.

The Germans Always Make Good Stuff

Black Bat material might be hard to come by in North America these days, but the Germans are about to be treated to another batch of books by Blitz-Verlag. Volumes 10, 11 and 12 of their paperback series are currently available for pre-order on their website.

These appear to be reprints of the original material from the late 30s to the early 50s. I believe the books are The Black Bat's Triumph, The Black Bat And The Trojan Horse and The Black Bat's Dragon Trail, based on Google Translate's rough translations of the titles. Those came out consecutively in the early 40s.

So Blitz is among the chronological original material reprinting scene and they are using updated versions of covers from the first German series for their current releases.  Example below.

The artist for those covers, by the way, was the extremely prolific Rudolf Sieber-Lonati. He was responsible for a ridiculous amount of cover art for crime and fantasy books from the 50s to the 80s but I believe he was best known for his science fiction work.

In any event, researching him specifically led me to a boatload of Fledermaus covers I still had not found, though they are of small size and/or of poor quality. I might have a little work to do there but the collection is becoming quite complete.  Here are a couple that struck me as being particularly eye-grabbing.

New Page: Blitz

It only takes up a small portion of the space underneath the banner, at far right, so you may not have noticed it, but I've created a page simply called Blitz.

From time to time, historical info about The Black Bat will mention that following the end of his adventures in Black Book Detective in 1953, he became something of a sensation in Germany. Translated versions of his stories began to appear in the 100th edition of Pabel Kriminal Roman in 1960 and in short order he became the series' leading man from issue 135 to at least 667.

But you can't keep a good bat down for long.

A publisher named Blitz-Verlag has been publishing Black Bat stories for the better part of the last decade now. A number of them have been reprints from the Black Book Detective run of 1939 to 1953 but there has been some original material as well. A.S. Jones, at right, refers to a Angelika Schröder who probably added the "Jones" to her initials in homage to the G.W. Jones name that accompanied so much of the character's past adventures.

Thus far, Blitz has published 12 books, reprint and new tales in equal amounts. The Blitz page above provides cover images for each one as well as translations of the solicitation text, to the best of my ability to do so. It's a little...choppy...at times, but you'll get the idea.

I've also fleshed out the Black Book Detective page a bit, adding names and publishing dates for the covers that are NOT yet available.

I was pleased to score a decent scan of the cover to one of the last issues (Winter 1952) which, interestingly, makes reference to a Tony Quinn and Carol Baldwin mystery. Miss Baldwin did not usually get named on the cover. Being that she was such an integral part of the Black Bat's origin and entourage, it's good to see her getting equal billing, however short-lived it was.