(Wonderworld Comics 019, 1940)
The Hood, a mysterious figure (who leaves a note with an unfortunately cut-off symbol that I can only assume/hope is a hood-and-crossbones) is terrorizing an unnamed city with a series of murders - eight in one week!
Going by the old wisdom that the murderer always returns to the scene of the crime, the Flame waits at the site of the latest murder and is rewarded when the Hood does just that. He is however unsuccessful in capturing the fiend due to the twin facts that a) the Hood thought to bring some guys along with him and b) an unfortunate woman happens by just in time to be taken hostage.
The Flame and the never-named woman are taken prisoner and spend some time escaping while the Hood lines up his next victim, a store owner who lives near the Sea Clock mentioned in his taunting note. This is when we finally get some inkling of the Hood's motivations: far from being an ordinary homicidal maniac, he is instead forcing his victims to sign over their property to him before murdering them.
(I would just like to take a second here to roast the Unnamed City authorities for the sheer amount of consternation they evince at the notion of a "sea clock" when they live in a town that has such a large clock tower located on its waterfront)
The Hood is finally unmasked and turns out to be the Unnamed City Mayor's personal secretary, Jenkins, who the Flame had held in deep suspicion for the entire issue for using the word "extraordinary" to describe the killer. This sort of thing is always highlighted when it pays off, but how many times does a crime go unsolved because of such unwarranted suspicion of a person with a weird vocabulary or a tendency for malapropisms, hmm?
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