Master of the Walking Dead

The original 1939 blurb for this story reads: "Molding corpses stalk darkness as fate cuts a grim, macabre jigsaw of death!" Today you would except a zombie story, as with the hit TV show "The Walking Dead," but in the original pages of the pulp magazine Thrilling Mystery, you get the opposite—a classic crime story by one of the best pulp writers of the era. The dead may walk, but there is always a rational explanation, no matter how sensational the blurb.