Sin, cigarettes and stiletto heels
By Eric Godtland. Excerpt from the book 'True Crime Detective Magazines'
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The second blow was wartime paper rationing, which would forever change detective magazines for the worse. Government-mandated rationing forced most titles to switch to pulp paper and many titles to cease publishing for the duration, and in some cases for good. The most ruinous decision the publishers made was to stick with the pulp after the rationing ended. As publishers became accustomed to the savings of cheap paper they looked for other ways to economize. Less was spent on crime research and the magazines became not only less attractive but less relevant.
Then in January of 1947 a crime occurred that foreshadowed the direction of the genre for the remainder of its life span. The Black Dahlia murder case, in which the naked and mutilated body of a beautiful Hollywood starlet was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles, riveted the detective readership. Horrible as it all was, the obvious sex appeal lurking in the back-story of this case was not lost on publishers struggling to hold a shrinking readership. Before the decade ended most titles had switched to stories with prurient fascination and were playing up the sexual angle in every possible crime.
For the collector of over-the-top, flagrantly sexual imagery the late 1940s through the 1950s represent the pinnacle for the detective titles. Earlier magazines were more beautifully printed, better written and featured cover art by fine artists, but not until the 1950s was the Bad Girl detective archetype refined to an icon. Women in Crime, Crime Girls,Women on Trial, Ladies of the Underworld, Crime Confessions, Girl Spies, Sensational Exposés and Vice Squad were just a few of the femme fatale-baited '50s titles drilling home the concept of woman as temptress. In 1950 the vision of a smoking, wisecracking, gorgeous whore in a slit skirt and breast-hugging sweater (or, better yet, a taxi dancer's striped Bohemian leotard!) spelled major trouble.With full, flowing hair and the occasional beatnik beret, this tart and her pals glared defiantly from police line-ups, conned suckers in seamy bars and brandished the justfired pistol at countless murder scenes. Even when she morphed into a teenage delinquent late in the decade she was all too alluring in her dungarees and leather jacket, lip curled with disdain, bouffant jutting skyward as the cops led her away.What was her crime? You name it, Joe. These dolls were guilty of everything from hanging around with JD hot rod rumblers to swinging hard at hophead parties. And don't even bother to ask why a beautiful, former choirgirl would be drawn to this degenerate underworld of crime and depravity. A mature man of the '50s, the typical detective magazine reader, knew the answer all too well. If not held tight in a restraining moral grip, if not penned at home by marriage, children and church, if not hogtied with girdles and aprons and single strands of ladylike pearls, any woman was capable of anything. One slip of the moral order and we'd be right back in Eden, one snake hiss away from disaster. Just ask the preacher man,my friend — all women are bad.
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Page [1] [2] [3]
The second blow was wartime paper rationing, which would forever change detective magazines for the worse. Government-mandated rationing forced most titles to switch to pulp paper and many titles to cease publishing for the duration, and in some cases for good. The most ruinous decision the publishers made was to stick with the pulp after the rationing ended. As publishers became accustomed to the savings of cheap paper they looked for other ways to economize. Less was spent on crime research and the magazines became not only less attractive but less relevant.
Then in January of 1947 a crime occurred that foreshadowed the direction of the genre for the remainder of its life span. The Black Dahlia murder case, in which the naked and mutilated body of a beautiful Hollywood starlet was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles, riveted the detective readership. Horrible as it all was, the obvious sex appeal lurking in the back-story of this case was not lost on publishers struggling to hold a shrinking readership. Before the decade ended most titles had switched to stories with prurient fascination and were playing up the sexual angle in every possible crime.
For the collector of over-the-top, flagrantly sexual imagery the late 1940s through the 1950s represent the pinnacle for the detective titles. Earlier magazines were more beautifully printed, better written and featured cover art by fine artists, but not until the 1950s was the Bad Girl detective archetype refined to an icon. Women in Crime, Crime Girls,Women on Trial, Ladies of the Underworld, Crime Confessions, Girl Spies, Sensational Exposés and Vice Squad were just a few of the femme fatale-baited '50s titles drilling home the concept of woman as temptress. In 1950 the vision of a smoking, wisecracking, gorgeous whore in a slit skirt and breast-hugging sweater (or, better yet, a taxi dancer's striped Bohemian leotard!) spelled major trouble.With full, flowing hair and the occasional beatnik beret, this tart and her pals glared defiantly from police line-ups, conned suckers in seamy bars and brandished the justfired pistol at countless murder scenes. Even when she morphed into a teenage delinquent late in the decade she was all too alluring in her dungarees and leather jacket, lip curled with disdain, bouffant jutting skyward as the cops led her away.What was her crime? You name it, Joe. These dolls were guilty of everything from hanging around with JD hot rod rumblers to swinging hard at hophead parties. And don't even bother to ask why a beautiful, former choirgirl would be drawn to this degenerate underworld of crime and depravity. A mature man of the '50s, the typical detective magazine reader, knew the answer all too well. If not held tight in a restraining moral grip, if not penned at home by marriage, children and church, if not hogtied with girdles and aprons and single strands of ladylike pearls, any woman was capable of anything. One slip of the moral order and we'd be right back in Eden, one snake hiss away from disaster. Just ask the preacher man,my friend — all women are bad.
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True Crime Detective Magazines
Hardcover, 23.2 x 27 cm (9.1 x 10.6 in.), 336 pages
$ 39.99
$ 39.99
The Golden Age of bad girls. Gun-toting femme fatales caught in the action!
True Detective, March 1966