Sin, cigarettes and stiletto heels
By Eric Godtland. Excerpt from the book 'True Crime Detective Magazines'
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Any screenwriter will tell you,"The only thing every good movie script must have is sex and violence".Which is to say life. Sex and violence represent the two peaks of human passion, man's greatest desire and direst fear, the best and worst of human existence, our beginning and our end. Perhaps this is why the combination of sex and violence is such a potent and irresistible taboo, not just the bones of a good film script, or a constant on the nightly news, but the basis for most entertainment today.
It was crime and passion that led the illiterate to buy newspapers; sex and violence that made them want to learn to read
We're so used to feasting on the media's sex and violence stew we assume it has been this way forever, but mass media, born with the newspaper, is a relatively new development. 150 years ago newspapers were the province of the educated elite, providing the sort of sober coverage needed to keep the peasants in their place. It took pictures to capture the attention of the largely illiterate working class, the sort of pictures that made a visceral and immediate impact. Can anybody guess what kind of pictures these were?
It was crime and passion that led the illiterate to buy newspapers; sex and violence that made them want to learn to read, and one of the most important bridges leading from the original elite media to the current events cacophony of today was the detective magazine. This genre was the first to artfully sensationalize all the prurient themes with which we are bombarded today. What caused the detective genre to suddenly spring up in the mid-19th century? The cylinder printing press invented in 1811 helped bring news from outside the neighborhood to the metropolitan rabble. During the 1830s further advances produced a "penny press", so named because it could turn out broadsheets cheaply enough to be sold profitably for a penny.Newspapers were suddenly within the means of most and began covering subjects of interest to a previously ignored group of readers: the working class. True crime coverage was quickly found to be a favorite with this newly literate sector. As both literacy and print technology further improved the western world experienced a newspaper boom.
For America this print revolution coincided with an urban crime wave. In the big Eastern cities,New York in particular, crime proliferated within the hungry, packedin, largely immigrant neighborhoods.With the rapid population growth people not only ceased to know their neighbors, they didn't know their neighbor's language, traditions or social ways.With so many strangers and strange cultures thrown together, the fear grew beyond gossip's ability to convey it. It was within this climate of crime and fear of crime that true crime reporting began in earnest.
Technically, the first true crime titles were born in 1924 when New York-based Macfadden introduced True Detective Mysteries, and an undistinguished pulp called Detective Tales was sold to a publisher in Chicago and reborn as Real Detective Tales. Both these new titles were largely fiction-based for the first four years of their runs, as they had been designed to compete with Detective Story Magazine and new competitors The Black Mask and Flynn's. Ironically, the only magazine experimenting with true crime stories at all during this period was Flynn's, the least popular of the three.
Around 1928 both True Detective Tales and Real Detective Tales split from the crime fiction genre. Although both had previously featured stories based around real crime, they'd held back on actual names, photos and explicit details. Gradually, though, both became emboldened to cover real crime alongside the fiction. True Detective showed more daring, moving to a completely true crime format by 1929. Real Detective, having changed its title to the clumsy Real Detective Tales & Mystery Stories in 1927, continued mixing fiction with reality until 1931.
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Any screenwriter will tell you,"The only thing every good movie script must have is sex and violence".Which is to say life. Sex and violence represent the two peaks of human passion, man's greatest desire and direst fear, the best and worst of human existence, our beginning and our end. Perhaps this is why the combination of sex and violence is such a potent and irresistible taboo, not just the bones of a good film script, or a constant on the nightly news, but the basis for most entertainment today.
It was crime and passion that led the illiterate to buy newspapers; sex and violence that made them want to learn to read
We're so used to feasting on the media's sex and violence stew we assume it has been this way forever, but mass media, born with the newspaper, is a relatively new development. 150 years ago newspapers were the province of the educated elite, providing the sort of sober coverage needed to keep the peasants in their place. It took pictures to capture the attention of the largely illiterate working class, the sort of pictures that made a visceral and immediate impact. Can anybody guess what kind of pictures these were?
It was crime and passion that led the illiterate to buy newspapers; sex and violence that made them want to learn to read, and one of the most important bridges leading from the original elite media to the current events cacophony of today was the detective magazine. This genre was the first to artfully sensationalize all the prurient themes with which we are bombarded today. What caused the detective genre to suddenly spring up in the mid-19th century? The cylinder printing press invented in 1811 helped bring news from outside the neighborhood to the metropolitan rabble. During the 1830s further advances produced a "penny press", so named because it could turn out broadsheets cheaply enough to be sold profitably for a penny.Newspapers were suddenly within the means of most and began covering subjects of interest to a previously ignored group of readers: the working class. True crime coverage was quickly found to be a favorite with this newly literate sector. As both literacy and print technology further improved the western world experienced a newspaper boom.
For America this print revolution coincided with an urban crime wave. In the big Eastern cities,New York in particular, crime proliferated within the hungry, packedin, largely immigrant neighborhoods.With the rapid population growth people not only ceased to know their neighbors, they didn't know their neighbor's language, traditions or social ways.With so many strangers and strange cultures thrown together, the fear grew beyond gossip's ability to convey it. It was within this climate of crime and fear of crime that true crime reporting began in earnest.
Technically, the first true crime titles were born in 1924 when New York-based Macfadden introduced True Detective Mysteries, and an undistinguished pulp called Detective Tales was sold to a publisher in Chicago and reborn as Real Detective Tales. Both these new titles were largely fiction-based for the first four years of their runs, as they had been designed to compete with Detective Story Magazine and new competitors The Black Mask and Flynn's. Ironically, the only magazine experimenting with true crime stories at all during this period was Flynn's, the least popular of the three.
Around 1928 both True Detective Tales and Real Detective Tales split from the crime fiction genre. Although both had previously featured stories based around real crime, they'd held back on actual names, photos and explicit details. Gradually, though, both became emboldened to cover real crime alongside the fiction. True Detective showed more daring, moving to a completely true crime format by 1929. Real Detective, having changed its title to the clumsy Real Detective Tales & Mystery Stories in 1927, continued mixing fiction with reality until 1931.
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True Police Cases, June 1968
