John S. Endicott
The Strange Adventures of the Purple Scar
Publication History:
“Medals of Murder” originally appeared in Exciting Detective (Fall 1941)
“The Night of Murder” originally appeared in Exciting Detective (Winter 1942)
“Murder in Gold” originally appeared in Exciting Detective (March 1942)
“The Chain of Murders” originally appeared in Exciting Detective (Winter 1943)
Introduction
Will Murray
No more obscure pulp crimebuster ever existed than John S. Endicott’s Purple Scar, the star of Exciting Detective in 1941-43.
Patterned after Thrilling Group’s other super-detectives, The Phantom, The Black Bat, and the Crimson Mask, he was part of that wave of pulp heroes that flooded newsstands after the Black Bat took Black Book Detective by storm. And like the Black Bat, his roots can be found in a previous story published by the Thrilling Group.
“The Sign of the Scar” was the lead novel in The Phantom Detective, September, 1936. The villain, an extortionist calling himself the Scar, wore a false head — a rubbery gray thing of featureless scar tissue-that made him look like a walking corpse. Crimson contact lenses gave him eyes like burning coals. He spoke in a cadaver’s sepulcheral voice.
But the Purple Scar probably owed as much to the Norman Daniels’ Black Bat. When D.A. Tony Quinn is blinded by acid, he loses his sight and decides to fight crime as the Black Bat, wearing a black hood over his head to hide the acid scars around his eyes. He takes on two assistants, a former confidence man named Kirby “Silk” Norton and a girl, Carol Baldwin.
For the Purple Scar series, this formula is repeated. The hero dons a scarred mask to conceal his true identity, while his main male assistant is a former pickpocket. That old standby, a mastery of disguise, is lifted from the pages of The Phantom Detective, but of course it goes back to Nick Carter.
One twist is that the nominal police presence is not antagonistic to the hero’s alter ego, but is a silent but staunch supporter.
As with Thrilling’s other hero series, they were solid plot-driven formula pulp stories.
“They were completely interchangeable,” editor Mort Weisinger recalled. “It’s like saying, do you want ham or bacon and eggs? One day I’m on Black Bat and the other I’m on Phantoms. Many of them were rewritten in the office by myself and some of the other editors to get them in shape. But they were damn good plots.”
The prolific ghostwriter of both series. Norman A. Daniels, assessed them this way: “They were kid stuff — just an offshoot of the old magazines they used to read behind the corncrib. Those things were just unsophisticated. They had a place, that’s all.”
The nominal author, John S. Endicott, was a Thrilling house name, most often employed to conceal the in-house writers of the filler short-short stories written around the covers. Originally, it was J.S. Endicott. For the Purple Scar series, the non-existent writer was granted a first name. During Puritan days, John Endicott was the zealot who tore down the maypole at Merrymount, Massachusetts.
Who this particular John S. Endicott was remains a mystery.
It’s easier to say who didn’t write the Purple Scar than did. It wasn’t either Norman A. Daniels or G.T. Fleming-Roberts, who kept complete records of their pulp sales. Stylistically, it’s not Laurence Donovan. He was too busy with the Phantom at that time.
Ray Cummings, Joe Archibald, maybe one of the new generation of writers like Don Tracy or Samuel Merwin Jr. are likely suspects.
Anatole France Feldman can be considered a strong suspect. Also known as Tony Field, Feldman broke into the gangster pulps in 1929, made a big splash with his Chicago hoodlum-hero “Big Nose” Serrano, then moved over to the Thrilling Group after Repeal killed the romantic myth of the Prohibition gangster.
He started ghosting episodes of The Phantom Detective early in that series’ long run, some in collaboration with series originator D.L. Champion. Over the years, he scripted Crime Photographer on radio, edited a slew of crime and confession magazines, and briefly edited comic books around 1940.
But my money’s on George A. McDonald, another veteran of the Phantom Detective series, who apparently wrote “The Sign of the Scar.” A newspaperman and U. S. Army veteran McDonald was one of Thrilling’s most prolific scribes. He began ghosting The Phantom Detective in 1934, and between 1935-38, he was the writer behind the Lynn Vickers novels in Dell’s Public Enemy and Federal Agent, where his byline was Bryan James Kelly. Under his own name, he wrote the “Killer Czar” stories for Thrilling’s Popular Detective.
In his regular life, McDonald broke into that field writing for the Lynn Daily Item in Massachusetts. Like Feldman, his first significant pulp sale was to Underworld. In 1934, he joined the staff of the New York Sun, later becoming railroad and public utilities editor. At the time of his death in 1962, McDonald was working as a financial writer for the New York World-Telegram, which he joined in 1957. He served his army hitch on the Mexican border during the period when Uncle Sam was chasing Pancho Villa, and then went over to France to fight in the First World War.
The chief problem with identifying Thrilling’s house-name authors was the huge amount of rewriting done by editors and other writers. “The Sign of the Scar” for example, shows signs of both Feldman and McDonald’s stylistics. It would not surprise me if the Purple Scar was some sort of collaboration. In fact, whoever wrote the first two may not be the same scribe who finished out the series. This was a period when the pulp magazine field was fast losing writers to the draft, or enlistment after the attack at Pearl Harbor.
Here and there, this unknown called his weird hero The Purple Mask. A slip of the typewriter? Or was this an editorial lapse? It’s conceivable that the Scar originally was known as The Purple Mask and the Thrilling editors changed him to the Scar, sometimes missing a stray noun. For this edition, we’ve corrected those mistakes.
The first cover was the work of Newton H. “Newt” Alfred. Primarily known as an interior artist, Alfred was simultaneously illustrating the interior pages to Street and Smith’s The Whisperer in 1940-42.
The Purple Scar ran in three consecutive issues of Exciting Detective, then skipped three. Plans to have him become the lead feature a la the Black Bat in Black Book Detective evidently hit some sort of snag. His fourth adventure was his final one.
After the Scar was phased out of Exciting Detective in favor of Laurence Donovan’s “Wildcat” Martin, McDonald shifted over to Private Detective. His Cupid “Killer” Cain stories appeared in 1943-44. Cain was noteworthy as the first pulp detective to pack a .357 Magnum revolver.
The Purple Scar was just gearing up when Pearl Harbor happened. Between enlistments and the draft, the pulp magazine field began losing writers, artists and editors. Writers were in great demand, and therefore consequently in short supply around a middling pulp house like the Thrilling chain. It may be that the loss of a steady ghostwriter more than any other factor led to the abandonment of the series. The Purple Scar might have been a paper casualty of World War II.
For a series that has passed under the radar of most pulp magazine collectors, the Purple Scar is an unsuspected treasure.