Bruce Wayne, dressed in the Batman costume at a social
function, runs into Commissioner Gordon, who confides in him that the Riddler
is back in town, leaving a corpse in the river with a tattoo on its chest.
Before long, the Riddler strikes again, vandalising a famous painting and
leaving behind another riddle. This starts a chain of riddles and crimes, as
the Riddler targets the “Wise Men of Gotham”. It’s up to Batman to solve the
riddles and save the wise men.
It’s the promising plot of Edward Wellen’s Wise Men of Gotham, collected in The Further Adventures of Batman. I don’t
know much about Wellen, and all I could discover about him was in obituaries
that informed me that he was a mystery-SF writer known for his short fiction.
(Why do mystery and sci-fi writers often cross over in genres? Seriously:
Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown, Robert Sheckley, René Reouven, and now Edward
Wellen!)
