Big, glossy coffee-table books have celebrated pin-up art and erotica/kitsch for years, but until now very few have delved into another genre that for decades occupied the bottom rack at the corner newsstand: The "true crime" magazine.
The pulp-paper predecessors of Cops, CSI, and The World's Scariest Police Chases, true crime mags—poor cousins of 19th-century British police gazettes—were popular fare in America from the time Bernarr Macfadden unleashed True Detective Mysteries magazine in 1924.
Now Roth Gallery in New York is showing a collection of magazine covers focusing on the genre's lurid Golden Age in the 1950s. "Cyanide and Sin" runs through February 17 and is accompanied by a limited edition book (PPP Editions, paper, $65) with an insightful essay by Will Straw, a professor of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University.
During their first few decades, true-crime magazines' covers aped detective-dime-novel artwork with melodramatic, painterly illustrations of women in distress, or women capable of causing others distress: screaming women; women holding bloody knives; women holding bottles of poison. Photos—real mug shots and crime scene photos—were relegated to the inside pages, mainly because so few real female criminals had the hourglass shapes and Hollywood looks needed to sell copies.
That all changed in 1954 when Inside Detective stole the full-bleed, black-and-white photo treatment that Life had made so authoritative in the thirties.
Inside Detective started staging mid-crime photos for their cover shoots, and instead of relying on melodrama, went deadpan. The cover lines are blunt, cryptic slaps in the face: "Baby, I'd kill to keep you." "I'll set him up in Lover's Lane . . . you follow." "Do me a favor, kill me." And the super creepy, "Step into my hearse, little Benny".
As Straw points out, the designer Fernando Texidor took over Inside Detective in 1947. In 1953 he hired photographers who would lend the reenactments enough life to be memorable. Bill Stone's covers revved up the drama by showing couples in trouble, "intertwined in acts of affection or violence." Burt Owen came on board in 1957, and Straw says that, though Owen had also shot for the overtly sleazy monthly masterpiece, Gent, "His covers for Inside Detective show men and women as equally anguished participants in rough-edged, unglamorous moments of frozen drama."
While other photographers "used the trend against forties glamour as a pretext for posing women in ways that heightened their degradation or vulnerability, Owen emphasized instead the banality of his settings and ordinariness of his subjects."
In other words, the covers imparted a quintessentially fifties message: The darkness isn't exotic, it's right next door.
While the covers could provide a lifetime of ideas for James Ellroy, some of the tales in Straw's account of the genre's rise and fall sound like true-crime versions of Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay. We learn about individuals like Leo Manso, who went from designing the magazine Hollywood Squawkies to respected Abstract Expressionist; Peter Gowlan, who photographed models and sent the smiling shots to pin-up mags and the frowning shots to the true crimers; and Milton Luros, who worked his way up from art director of Confidential Detective Cases to boss of a $25 million-a-year Los Angeles-based pornography empire.
The magazines' focus on booze-addled victims and sex-crazed banshees was, of course, a sensational distortion of real, contemporary concerns about crime in America. Meanwhile, the "authentic" approach that publications like Inside Detective adopted in an effort to compete with newspapers proved to have its limits. Straw notes that, in the end, unsurprisingly, pretty faces and tight sweaters were what ultimately sold copies.
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