C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner were known in the Science Fiction world as the perfect husband-wife team. Kuttner could fall into bed late at night, his story unfinished, to wake and find his beautiful gal, Catherine, had completed the tale seamlessly. Even to this day scholars still argue about who wrote what.
I believed for years that the first and only time the two collaborated was on “Stark and the Star Kings”, a team-up of their two most popular characters that sat in limbo for thirty years. After reading the Tangent Online interview I found out this wasn’t true. The other time they had collaborated in fiction was three chapters in Hamilton’s The Valley of Creation. Robert A. W. Lowdnes had pointed out that spot in the novel as a great piece of Hamilton. Ed grudgingly admitted “Thank you for nothing. My wife wrote it.”
The other collaboration, and the one I want to look at here was a comic script called “The Lord of Batmanor” for Detective Comics #198 (August 1953). Ed had been writing for DC Comics since 1946 and had added to the Superman and Batman mythologies. “The Lord of Batmanor”, drawn by Dick Sprang and Charles Paris (but signed Bob Kane), was a twelve-pager that had Lord McLaughlie give his estate to Batman, in the hopes he can clear up a four hundred year old mystery. The McLaughlies had been charged with hiding the king’s gold, but the lord of the manor died in battle and nobody knew where the fortune was hidden. McLaughlie had hired an American detective named Sam Smathers but he turns out to be a crook, who brings his pals across the pond to steal the gold. To distract the locals Smathers uses a robotic Loch Ness Monster. Batman quickly discovers the truth and figures out where the gold is and how to catch the crooks.