Oppenheim’s Detectives: Daniel Craig, The Bystander
AN OVERWHELMING majority of Oppenheim’s pulp output were aviation stories, many featuring our intrepid trio, The Three Mosquitoes. In 1933, when the Mosquitoes were winding down their adventures in Popular Publications aviation magazines, Oppenheim tried his hand at a new genre that was very popular at the time—detective fiction. Over the next fourteen years oppenheim would produce eighteen detective stories for the some of the leading magazines in the field—Dime Detective and Dime Mystery Magazines, Popular Detective, Thrilling Detective, Thrilling Mystery, Black Book Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Strange Detective Mysteries and Phantom Detective—as well as even ghost writing a Phantom Detective story (”Murder Calls the Phantom” March 1941).
Finally we have Daniel Craig, known as the Bystander. . .
He could see himself, young Daniel Craig, then a humble clerk, walking proudly to the marriage-license bureau with the lovely girl who had consented to be his bride. They had been strolling past a bank when the hold-up gang had barged out with their loot, guns blazing a thoughtless swathe. Craig and his fiancee had been what the newspapers called “innocent bystanders.” Craig had only been wounded, but the slug that hit the girl had ripped the life from her; she had died in Craig’s arms.
Daniel Craig had left all vestige of humble, happy youth in the hospital; he’d come out like tempered steel. In a month he’d hunted down that bank-gang, and killed the man whose thoughtless slugs had slain his fiancee. After that, giving up clerking, Craig had opened this office—into which he now strode—as a private detective. But rarely did a case come whose storm-signals he had not seen beforehand; for as the Bystander, no longer an innocent one, he roamed the streets looking for crime.
Oppenheim’s Bystander appeared in three issues of Dime Mystery Magazine often confronted with weird menaces.
Beauty Treatments for Corpses
July 1940
In his first appearance, 
the Bystander’s eye is caught by a girl reminiscent of one from his past that leads him to a rotting corpse that had been very much alive moments before. The girl’s own sister tries to hire Craig to investigate why her own body seems to be rotting away until her husband phones and tells her not to. That’s like waving a bone in front of a dog and Craig can’t help but investigate this bizarre series of deaths! From the July 1940 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine it’s Ralph Oppenheim’s Bystander in “Beauty Treatments for Corpses!”
(P.S.—This story contains what must be one of the longest scene of a villain boasting about the details of his fiendish plan ever. I get the feeling Oppenheim had more story than he had room to tell it in and had to resort to the exposition to flesh out the story so to speak. No pun intended.)
On four slabs in the morgue lay the girls who had fallen victim to the mad master of rotting flesh. But to Daniel Craig they marked only the beginning of a murder plague which was to bring him within the very jaws of hell!
- Download “Beauty Treatments for Corpses” (July 1940, Dime Mystery Magazine)
The Bystander—self-sworn enemy of crime since the day his bride became the innocent victim of gunmen’s lead—appeared in two more bizarre tales of weird crime resulting in hideous corpses in the pages of Dime Mystery Magazine:
Thieves Without Faces
September 1940
When the Bystander started out to 
clear lovely Anne Ferris of a shop-lifting charge, he could not guess what was waiting for him. In all his long years of fighting crime, the Bystander had never seen anything like those vastly, distorted corpses—or that he was putting himself into the power of a monstrous murder syndicate whose victims died with the flesh decaying on their bodies! The Bystander found himself trapped and helpless—while they prepared for their last, most fiendish act of all!
Death Stalks in Purple
February 1941
At first the Bystander refused 
to help the police find the maker of those hideous, purple corpses. But then people began taking pot shots at him from dark corners, and he realized that Ahmed Bey and company had no real interest in his further health. And the Bystander was never the man to turn down a dare—especially from Death! For the death-loaded touch of an invisible finger was turning lovely young girls into rigid corpses—hideously purple!
“Adventures Into The Unknown!” Blakeslee published fourteen installments of his two-page illustrated looks into the Unknown between March 1948 and October 1950. This time around Mr. Blakeslee tells us about the SS Watertown, a gasoline tanker, that was haunted by two crewmen who perished on board in 1925 and were buried at sea. Their heads were clearly visible just off the bow, following the ship as it continued on it’s course! From the December 1949 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine it’s “Adventures Into The Unknown: The Haunted Tank!”
installments of Blakeslee’s Adventures Into The Unknown. That was just the first half of the series. This October we’ll be presenting the remaining seven installments. First up, Mr. Blakeslee relates a story of an innocent man cursing the very ground over his grave—stating before being hung, that in proof of his innocence no grass would grow on his grave for a generation! And sure enough, no grass would grow over his grave for one hundred and twenty years! From the October 1949 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine it’s “Adventures Into The Unknown: Death Above and Below!”
“Adventures Into The Unknown!” Blakeslee published fourteen installments of his two-page illustrated looks into the Unknown between March 1948 and October 1950. This time around Mr. Blakeslee examines the phenomenon known as ‘Orang Bunian’—or ‘the Talking Men.’ It is the hearing of the voices of the dead in broad daylight—usually over the site where there had once been a village! From the August 1949 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine it’s “Adventures Into The Unknown: The Talking Men!”
“Adventures Into The Unknown!” Blakeslee published fourteen installments of his two-page illustrated looks into the Unknown between March 1948 and October 1950. This time around Mr. Blakeslee delves into one of the most famous and most controversial incidents in the history of the occult. It’s the story of two English school teachers and what happened to them on a trip to Versailles in August 1901. Is what they experienced a paranormal encounter or possibly some sort of time slip? You be the judge—from the June 1949 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine it’s “Adventures Into The Unknown: The Haunted Trianon!”
“Adventures Into The Unknown!” Blakeslee published fourteen installments of his two-page illustrated looks into the Unknown between March 1948 and October 1950. This time around Mr. Blakeslee delves into possible evidence of the Devil appearing on a cold snowy night in 1855 in Exmouth—from the April 1949 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine it’s “Adventures Into The Unknown: The Devil Walks at Night!”
“Adventures Into The Unknown!” Blakeslee published fourteen installments of his two-page illustrated looks into the Unknown between March 1948 and October 1950. This time around Mr. Blakeslee delves into the stories of the evil ghosts of the Borley Rectory—often referred to as the most haunted house in all of England. From the pages of the February 1949 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine, it’s “Adventures Into The Unknown: The Evil Ghosts of Borley!”
“Adventures Into The Unknown!” Blakeslee published fourteen installments of his two-page illustrated looks into the Unknown between March 1948 and October 1950. With the demise of SHOCK after just three issues, “Adventures Into The Unknown” moves to the long-running Dime Mystery Magazine! In the December 1948 installment, Blakeslee focuses on the Isle of Man and the reported spectral goings on in “Adventures Into The Unknown: The Spectre Hound in Man”
an illustrated feature Blakeslee ran in the pages of New Publications’ weird mystery magazine SHOCK.This was “Adventures Into The Unknown”. “Adventures Into The Unknown” was a two page illustrated feature that explored weird and eerie mysteries and tales.