Crossover of the Week

May 1938

THE IRON PHANTOM

            Richard Benson learned hobo code from a man named A-Number One. Nellie Gray and Smitty get into a fight with two men, one of whom is short and apelike, the other well-dressed and wielding a sword cane. Benson goes to the offices of the Classic newspaper seeking information. The editor expresses surprise that Benson came to them rather then the Times or the Planet. Benson asks a Classic reporter named Burke about his interview with inventor Elias Martinson. Martinson at one point was working on a mechanical man, but complications caused him to seek the aid of another inventor, Charles Link. Benson later tells Nellie and Smitty that the men they fought are actually in the same line of work as they are, and that their battle was the result of a misunderstanding.

            Short story by Matthew Baugh in The Avenger: Roaring Heart of the Crucible, Nancy Holder and Joe Gentile, eds., Moonstone Books, 2013. A-Number One is from the movie Emperor of the North. Nellie and Smitty’s opponents are Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks, two of Doc Savage’s aides. Clyde Burke, besides being a reporter for the New York Classic, is also one of the Shadow’s agents. The New York Planet is the newspaper that employs Foster Fade, “the Crime Spectacularist,” who appeared in three stories by Lester Dent in All Detective Magazine in 1934. Elias Martinson is meant to be the unnamed inventor from Robert E. Howard’s unfinished El Borak story “The Iron Terror.” Charles Link is the creator of “Eando Binder’s” (Earl and Otto Binder) robot Adam Link.