The Detective Tales Cover for November

This is my monthly upload of a Detective Tales cover. I re-started this tradition last year, with this very long post. This one will be shorter. It was difficult to top the cover for November last year. I don't think I could, actually. There was just something about that casino scene. Maybe I am playing it safe, I don't know, with a conventional, melodramatic cliffhanger (literally!) scene. Well, there is something uncommon about this cover: the damsel in distress is a brunette, not a blonde. It is from November 1940. We see the lady hanging on a rope from a skyscraper, the hero shooting at an unseen enemy (a recurring element) and the overtly (and old fashioned) elegant villain approaching him from behind, ready to stab him with a sharp knife. I love how the villain manages to look brutish in spite of his fancy clothes. Anyway, it does not have the mystery of the one I uploaded last year, but it is enjoyable all the same. They seem to complicate their life a lot when they wantt o execute someone. Or maybe it is a mean of torture and the damsel in distress was being interrogated. I really need to read some of these old pulp stories.