The Detective Tales cover for September

Every month, I upload here the cover of a Detective Tales magazine. As Halloween is coming soon(ish) and I get in a spooky mood as early as September, I thought I would upload a picture that belongs both to crime fiction and the horror genre. This is the September 1939 cover. Maybe it explains why it is so sinister. You have the squared jaw hero, who just freed the (very blonde) femme fatale/damsel in distress from a coffin (or at least he unlocked it with a crowbar), gunning away an unknown adversary while a badguy, looking very blue in the moonlight and sinister like an the Eastern butler of an Eastern undead nobleman, is trying to stab him with a large knife, with a large bull eye window in the background. I am very skeptical about the mix of genres in general, but in this one it works very well. It is a (melo)dramatic, claustrophobic picture. And it works quite well, I think.