Here is an early Halloween treat from the crumbly pages of the vintage pulp magazine Weird Tales (September 1936). Death Holds the Post is a scary tale of far flung French Foreign Legion outposts in the Sahara suddenly besieged by mysterious dark forces–reanimated corpses controlled by the outlaw German mystic Otto Prettweg. It’s up to Legionnaire Eddie Cranston to match wits with Prettweg and save his comrades from a fate certainly worse than death in the desert.
(An interesting side note to this story is the author’s decisions to name one of the Legion forts in this story “Surdez”. This is surely a head nod to the great pulp writer Georges Surdez who’s specialty was writing fictional tales of the French Foreign Legion.
Mon Legionnaire 
Well-timed for Haloween, which by the way we don’t celebrate here in South Africa.. I think the writer had just read Beau Geste, and the opening scene (dead men on the walls 0f the fort) was still haunting him. At first I thought it had great promise. Wow! The German doctor had an elixir that could defeat death. What a marvellous discovery. Pettiweg for the Nobel Prize for Medicine 1936. A pity he did not have an anti-decaying cure. Why did he have to be killed?. He was such a brilliant scientist. When Dr Barnard performed the first heart transplant, we didn’t kill him. We found a means to overcome the rejection of the organ. Never knew that legionnaires were all armed with revolvers! Nothing is ever mentioned about the stench which must have been appaling.
Thanks Jack. It was a great find. You should be made an honary legionnaire for all your hard research.
Eugene
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Eugene,
That was indeed an odd story but enjoyable at 12 pages. Those pulp writers churned them out by the thousands.
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