During the heyday of the pulp magazines, no publisher ruled the roost quite like Street & Smith. Although S&S ran popular magazines like Astounding Stories and other imprints that published a wide variety of authors, the company made their bones as the premiere pushers of single-character hero pulps. It was Street & Smith that gave the world The Shadow and Doc Savage, the two most popular and enduring pulp characters of all time. With The Shadow, S&S and author Walter B. Gibson created the archetype of the dark, elemental crimefighter. From the wellspring of The Shadow came Batman, with the latter being an almost perfect palimpsest of the former.
As for Doc Savage, the super-genius “Man of Bronze” is the clear father of Superman.
In the late 1930s, Street & Smith sought to tighten their grip on the pulp market by debuting a new serial character. The initial idea was to simply enhance what was already working by combining elements of both The Shadow and Doc Savage into a new vigilante-type character. Pulp veteran Paul Ernst, an Ohio native who wrote for both the pulps and “slicks” as a freelancer, got the job of writing the new character’s stories and novellas. Thus, in September 1939, Street & Smith debuted The Avenger with his very own magazine.
Like The Shadow, The Avenger is a wealthy man of leisure who uses his vast fortune to combat crime as a private detective-cum-vigilante. Like Doc Savage, The Avenger is super-skilled and super-brilliant to an almost inhuman degree. The Avenger is in reality Richard Henry Benson (no, not that Richard Benson), an engineer by trade but an adventurer by temperament. Before becoming The Avenger, Benson lived an extraordinary life. He cultivated rubber in Brazil, discovered precious stones in Alaska and South Africa, and even led a private army in Java. Benson’s world changed forever when, during a plane ride from Buffalo to Canada, his wife Alicia and daughter Alice were kidnapped by crooks. This tragedy fundamentally alters Benson—his hair turned gray, his skin went pale, and the muscles in his face became paralyzed to such a degree that the skin turned into a kind of putty.
After leaving the hospital, Benson vows to discover the whereabouts of his family. But now, rather than search for them as a mere millionaire named Richard Benson, he takes on the moniker of The Avenger. The Avenger dresses in gray in order to connect his clothes to his gray appearance as a single, seamless organism. Because his paralyzed face is malleable, The Avenger uses his fingers to mold it into any disguise, thus becoming “The Man of a Thousand Faces” (a sobriquet original used for the great actor Lon Chaney, Sr.). And, like any self-respecting vigilante, The Avenger is well-armed. However, unlike The Shadow, who goes into battle dual wielding Colt .45s, The Avenger fights the scourge of crime with two unique gadgets. One, called “Mike,” is a suppressed .22 pistol that “creases” the skulls of its victims in order to render them unconscious rather than dead. The Avenger’s other primary weapon is nicknamed “Ike,” and it is a throwing knife with a needlepoint. There are other weapons and gadgets, like gas bombs, bullet-proof vests, and portable two-way radios. Thanks to his fortune, which includes Aztec gold, The Avenger is capable of equipping himself for any situation.
Helping The Avenger in his perilous missions are the members of Justice, Inc., The Avenger’s stable of assistants and fellow crimefighters. The first to join is Algernon Heathcote “Smitty” Smith, a 6’9” ex-con whose dumb exterior belies the fact that he is a world-class genius when it comes to electronics. Smitty joins Justice, Inc. at the same time as the Scotsman Fergus “Mac” MacMurdie, a grumpy pharmacist and chemist who joins forces with The Avenger in order to punish criminals for the death of his family. The most memorable member of Justice, Inc., Nellie Gray, joins the team a little later. Gray is a small, but fierce jiu-jitsu expert and the daughter of a murdered archaeologist. It is Nellie’s quest for vengeance that leads Justice, Inc. to the Aztec treasure horde, which proves to be inexhaustible in the series. The final three members of Justice, Inc. include Josh and Rosabel Newton, a husband-and-wife team of Tuskegee Institute graduates who specialize in undercover work; and Cole Wilson, a light-hearted scamp who mostly provides comic relief.
The Avenger and Justice, Inc. fight a mixed bag when it came to villains. Sometimes the bad guys are simple gangsters with mundane motivations (money and power). Other times, The Avenger squares off against super-villains with pseudo-supernatural powers. The Avenger and Justice, Inc. always get their man, however, and that is how it should be in such tales.
The original run of The Avenger in the pulps lasted from 1939 until 1942. Although generally popular with readers, the character did not catch on quite like either The Shadow or Doc Savage. Still, The Avenger managed to stay alive in Clues Detective magazine as a character in several short stories written by Emile C. Tupperman, plus there was a short-lived Avenger radio show (1941-1942) that was broadcast on WHN in New York City. The Avenger did disappear after the mid-1940s and did not return until the comic book era, when D.C. Comics purchased the rights to the character in the 1970s. Also in the 1970s, the Warner Paperback Library not only reprinted Ernst’s classic Avenger novellas, but the company also hired writer Ron Goulart to write twelve new Avenger novellas. New Avenger novels are still being churned out today by Moonstone Books. Sometimes a character is just too good (or too weird) to ever die.
The Avenger is one of the more overlooked heroes from the pulp age. Much of this has to do with the character’s obvious debts to The Shadow and Doc Savage. That said, The Avenger is more than just the sum of his influences. The character is unique and has his own mythos that is worthy of appreciating. And, most important of all, The Avenger novellas by Ernst are exceptionally good examples of pure pulp. The stories move at a frenetic pace, and a whole lot of two-fisted justice gets dispensed by Justice, Inc. No pulp fan of our epoch has any excuse to skip The Avenger, and the paperback reprints from the 1970s and Moonstone originals can be purchased online for chump change. So, cough up the dough already and take a big bite out of crime as the newest member of Justice, Inc.
You can thank me later.
Creasing the skull with a .22 (presumably .22LR) whould kill a person if you managed to do it. Reason being is that you whould have to have the bullet pass just over the skull to put enough pressure to put a crease in the skull whitch whould damage the brain. Also being that close you whould more than likely juast shoot the person.