QUICK SHOTS: The Phantom Detective: The Daggers of Kali by Robert (E. Hoffmann Price) Wallace - UPDATED

The Phantom Detective is probably no one's favorite pulp hero. Though he must have been plenty of folks back in the day because he outlasted the greats, i.e. The Shadow and Doc Savage. I have a feeling this is mostly because he's not as outlandish or, well, memorable, giving his tales a mildly flavorful punch but generally more palatable for a general audience. No, wild adventures or exotic mysticism, they seem to run toward straight mysteries. At least in the ones I have read, there's tons of Phantom tales and I'm no expert. 

I came to the Phantom Detective via a couple of the old Cornith paperbacks purchased with a fistful Doc's one day at a flea market. I tried one and found it lacking in the pulpiness I was craving. I think I mistakenly assumed that all Pulp Heroes were like The Spider. After that I took to reading other kinds of tales from the pulps and later when I tried the Phantom again I liked him a bit more. Sometimes you need to figure yourself out.

What Secret Agent X and Operator 5 did for the espionage tale; The Phantom Detective does for the golden age mystery. The Phantom (as he's called in the text, sometimes confusing me into thinking he's wearing purple tights) tales are a lot of the time fairly straight pulp mystery tales with sprinkles of the fantastic. When I first started reading them, that wasn't what I wanted from a pulp novel. I don't think I read very good ones either. The Phantom Detective had a rotating authorship and as any M.A. aficionado knows, that breeds inequality. 

Awesome authors like Norman A. Daniels, Ray Cummings and D.L. Champion wrote for the series but E. Hoffmann Price was the writer behind "The Daggers of Kali" and it was him that made me finally pull another Phantom off the shelf. I dig a lot of his work, especially the occult detective Pierre d'Artois series and his adventure tales in the spicy magazines. He's an interesting author who lived an adventurous life himself and it comes through in his work. I was curious what he would do with (to me) fairly bland Phantom Detective. 

And what did he do? He delivered the most slam-bang Phantom Detective novel I've read. Easily my favorite in the series so far. There're mysterious stolen (maybe cursed) daggers, multiple lock roomed mysteries, superweapons, missing scientist daughters, mobsters, villainous characters with names like The Tiger and The Baron, deadly cults, daring escapes and tons of disguises. The pedal is all the way through the floorboard on this one as Price grabs your collar and pulls you along with the ups and downs of the Phantom as he rushes around and plays hero. The Phantom Detective's I've read often suffer from a lacking villain; Price avoids that with the Tiger. He's nasty and an equal to The Phantom in brains and brawn. Price knows to keep the clues, fighting and knockouts coming quickly and writes the action in a clean and crisp way and pushed the narrative to a satisfactory conclusion. In short, he's a pro.

The Phantom Detective is probably a C-List pulp hero. I certainly would rarely pick up one of his adventures as opposed to a nice Norvell Page Spider or even an apocalyptic Operator 5, but I'm glad I finally read another one. Maybe I've been too hard on The Phantom in the past, or maybe this is an outlier. I wouldn't recommend him for your first pulp novel but it's pretty good when you've ingested as much of it as I have. The Phantom Detective has been reprinted quite a bit so it's easy to tracks down a sample for testing.

UPDATE: 

Welp, folks. I was wrong. Apparently, Malcom Wheeler-Nicholson wrote this adventure of The Phantom Detective. I was corrected by none-other than pulp maestro Will Murray, so you know he's correct. I'm going to leave the review the way it is because I'm sorta lazy and I'm working on the next one, but I had to put an amendment on here to show that I don't know much, and I'll have to read something else of Wheeler-Nicholson's and do him justice. Thanks.