JULIUS W.LONG (1907–1955) was mainly a writer of detective stories, but he was a great fan of supernatural fiction, writing enthusiastic letters to Weird Tales while writing for other publications. He was born in Ohio, received a law degree, and was admitted to the Ohio bar, where he practiced. A collector of guns (at one time he owned the only Tokerev 7.62 ever offered for sale in The American Rifleman), his extensive knowledge of firearms was often apparent in his articles for Field and Stream as well as in his crime and mystery stories.
Long wrote many different types of fiction for about thirty magazines, most importantly ghost and fantastic stories for the top magazine in the genre, Weird Tales, to which he contributed nine stories in the 1930s, and mystery stories for Black Mask, Detective Story, Dime Detective, Dime Story, The Shadow, and Strange Detective Tales. One of his Black Mask stories, “Carnie Kill” (1945), was selected for Best Detective Stories of the Year (1946). He wrote only one novel, Keep the Coffins Coming (1947), a murder mystery involving a beautiful woman, her millionaire father, a Communist leader, a German scientist, and several gorillas. One of his short stories served as the basis for the motion picture The Judge (1949); it was released in Great Britain as The Gambler. The story of a crooked lawyer who blackmails his client into killing his wife, it was directed by Elmer Clifton, produced by Anson Bond, with a screenplay by Samuel Newman, Clifton, and Bond. It starred Milburn Stone, Katherine DeMille, Paul Guilfoyle, and Stanley Waxman.
“He Walked by Day” was published in the June 1934 issue of Weird Tales.