Another fun reading of the will sleep-over in a haunted castle mystery from the August 1944 issue of Suspense Comics #5. Folks from this era just couldn't get enough of this sort of set-up in film, books, comics, radio plays, etc, --and this time combined with a cool "don't turn the final page until you figure out the murderer" gimmick as well! Costumed killer. Vase to the face. Some tales just have it all. And yes, if two must die in our previous post HERE, --then three shall die today! (Should we go for four in our next post?)
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This felt like the old Clue board come to life, in a good way. I didn't try very hard to guess the murderer, but it was a fun read.
I wish more mystery stories has that "Guess the murderer" part. Not that I wouldn't be terrible at it.
The art here tends to suffer from a really static layout, 9 to 7 panels most every page (though Moore famously did this on Watchmen), though there's a couple places of interest where the specter breaks the panel border.
There's some good use of light and dark in this (especially using a line that cuts the panel into light and shadow, it does that quite a bit) and it's pretty good art for mid 40s.
I do like how the specter keeps getting interrupted trying to murder somebody! Man he had a bad day!
BTW: Same general plot as the Scooby Doo episode A night of Fright is No Delight!
But hold on. If his goal is to kill Alice... well... why doesn't he? He has her by the throat at the bottom of page four and then absconds with her for some reason. By the bottom of five, she's swooning on the floor next to the safe, alive and well--and the killer has taken off his mask for some oddball reason. This necessitates the cold-blooded murder of the waitress, the one totally innocent bystander, and then the murderer yet again runs off instead of just icing Alice, who is lying there helpless. It's kind of hard to buy Lawyer Norton was particularly serious about this attempted murder.
Or particularly sound in his criminal strategy either. This has come up before, but I fail to see how a lawyer, fabricating details of a will and then murdering the rightful heirs, can hope to get away with it. I mean, no matter how well he covers his tracks, the next lawyer along is going to look at that will and see it never stipulated any such thing. This throws all kinds of suspicion right on the killer.
This story was so fun to read. It was kind of a puzzle just trying to use the clues at hand to suss out just who the people were from frame to frame. Isobel and Alice were easy enough to sort, until the artist started getting the hair color wrong. The balding men with round glasses looked just alike--but their suits were different colors. One has an ascot, one a tie. Much of the time the characters are in silhouette or deep in the panel, and therefore hard to ID. The dialog was always a great help: "I'm going to find Alice!" "Where is Lawyer Norton?" "Someone shot Elsie but where is Cousin Willy?" It kind of has an Abbot and Costello cadence to it. But then the tails of the word balloons just go wherever, willy-nilly. I love the center square of page two, where the painting on the wall is complaining about how scary the place is.
Is their idea of mystery to confuse us? Cause I was confused. Do like the idea, though.
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