He appeared in Black Bat Detective Mysteries (published by The Berryman Press), a short-lived pulp which saw six issues, all written by Murray Leinster (a pen-name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins), between 1933 and 1934. The character was called Black Bat in the way Simon Templar was called the Saint; unlike the Simon Templar books, however, none of the Black Bat stories ever mentioned the character's real name.