The Strange Adventures of the Purple Scar

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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.

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