Crime Detective Magazine Covers

[Candi Ruman]

Fromthe Detective Magazine Series. A body of work where I recreated old 1960s and 70s true crime magazine covers. (which inevitably depicted women being attacked - a social commentary on fetishism and women's rights)

Born in Hammond, Indiana, the son of a paint salesman, Abbett early on imagined spending his professional life behind a camera. Yet after serving with the U.S. Navy Air Corps in World War II, he earned a Fine Arts degree from the University of Missouri and undertook jobs as a commercial artist in Chicago before moving to Connecticut. Proximity to New York City helped him win assignments to paint covers for Permabooks, Ballantine, Pyramid, and other publishing houses. His efforts graced works by crime novelists ranging from Robert Kyle and Richard Deming to A.A. Fair (aka Erle Stanley Gardner), John Creasey, and William Campbell Gault. As he grew older, Abbett specialized in fine-art paintings of dogs and less-cosseted wildlife.

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The artwork from this era is classic usually showing a sexy seductive woman in a sexy tight colorful outfit wearing high heels and in a setting where booze, smoking, and a hint of a bedroom is nearby. Because these are detective magazines, there is a hint of some sort of mystery, crime, or other vice happening.

By 1957, many detective magazine covers seemed to switch over to photo covers with carefully posed crime scenes or actual crime photos. The fonts used are more simplistic and the covers usually are packed with blurbs.

These magazines are a lot rarer than a lot of collecting due to the nature of people throwing away magazines after a read. Finder decent conditions can be a challenge and there are no comprehensive books that list every publisher or title or show every cover.

There is only one readily available book that discusses these magazines. It has plenty of illustrations of these magazines and good text about the subject. It was put out by Taschen and well worth the money: True Crime Detective Magazines by Eric Godtland. Because this field of collecting is relatively new and unexplored, there are some real gems to be had out there!

The have some really Awesome Detective Magazine prints! They are only $10 each and are the best quality I have seen. These make cool displays for your wall and are perfect gifts for anyone into this type of art. They also sell a lot of vintage pulp and paperback related cover art prints as well as pinup art with kitschy humor sayings.

Storage of these vintage magazines should be kept in mylar bags of magazine sized poly bags with back boards. Supplies like these can be found on ebay. I personally recommend GERBER products. They are by far the best for storing your collection and they look really good too. Comic book stores usually carry their items and also sell magazine sized storage boxes as well.

The preceding are all scans of magazines from my personal collection. I hope you enjoyed this brief Guide to Collecting Vintage Detective Magazines and get as much enjoyment out of these magazines as I have.

The March 1953 issue offered up a very beautiful redhead on the cover with the line: Necklace of Death for Rosamond. With ads galore and stories as murderously sensational, the magazine fit right in with the crime drama sections of newsstands.

The magazine itself is filled with stories about women with evil intent and the men they intended to bestow that evil upon. True? Possibly. Within the genre, True Detective was regarded as the standard bearer of quality and reliability. Maybe its sister Master Detective followed suit.

Startling Detective is another Fawcett Publication and makes a play for real life mystery stories by using actual photographs as its illustrations. The March 1953 issue contains 10 true features including Two Telegrams From A Corpse and Fickle Fiance and Murder. And of course, all the stories lend well to illustration. The actual photographs coupled with the very good illustrations make this magazine a definite standout.

The following images are taken from covers of various magazines starting in the 1920's on through to 1990's. Starting out as Detective Stories, these publications with lone wolf protagonist who much like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade work outside the system neither criminal nor police and incorporate stories which have a substantial element of mystery in their content. The Black Mask cover from 1920, first line left side, describe the magazine as "A Magazine of Mystery, Romance. and Adventure. By 1922 it's motto has become "A Magazine of Mystery and Detective Stories". Evidence of the idea that mystery had a major influence on the goings on rendered in these stories.

After studying the progression of the covers it's not hard to see that the Detective Magazines later become Crime Stories which as time passes actually provide a conduit for sexual exploitation. The need to constantly manufacture shock for readership turns the intellectual give and take of a mystery story into what could be called shock value dirt literature.

In fact, these are the titles of purportedly 'true' accounts of crime found between the pages of pulp magazines of the mid-20th century, such as True Crime, True Detective and Best Detective Cases. The lurid titles designed to titillate and thrill readers caught the eye of Australia's Customs officials soon after the pulp crime genre exploded in popularity in the 1930s.

True Detective, the first of the true crime genre, was created in the United States in 1924. Initially, stories published in the magazine were fictionalised accounts of notorious crimes, but later the editors leaned towards publishing only factual accounts. The publication was so popular in the States that even J Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, professed to a subscription. Despite the sensationalist reporting, American law enforcement officials did not denounce or condemn the magazines. In fact, interest in crime was encouraged. True Detective published photographs of known fugitives so that readers could assist in tracking them down.

True crime magazines were just as popular in Australia. By July 1934, around 100,000 copies of pulp crime magazines had been imported into NSW alone. But Australia's Customs Department did not see the magazines as a vicarious thrill or crime-fighting tool; they were viewed as a dangerous mix of violence and horror. True Detective and many of its contemporaries purporting to tell 'authentic stories of crime detection' were declared prohibited imports in the 1930s.

Pulp magazines like True Detective were prohibited under obscenity laws, despite rarely portraying sexual material. The crimes presented often had lascivious undertones, but censors took greater issue with the considerable emphasis on violence. In a Cabinet Minute in 1959, the head of Customs pointed out, 'The publishers [of True Detective] go to some length to re-enact the ghastly and gruesome details associated with murder cases'. Actors and actresses with hammed-up expressions of lechery and fear posed for re-enactments of crimes that played up scandalous details.

Occasionally, single issues or subscriptions were allowed into Australia. In 1939, freelance journalist W Charnley from Western Australia wrote to the Assistant Comptroller-General in Customs to request importation of True Detective for work purposes. Charnley had submitted work to the magazine before, and felt it necessary 'that a writer keep in touch with the papers he writes for so as to observe what is going on and also to obtain ideas for his own use'.

The Senior Clerk in Customs agreed and advised the Assistant Comptroller-General to allow the importation: 'This appears to be a case for sympathetic consideration'. Charnley was permitted to receive a single subscription to the magazine.

Many pulp crime magazines remained prohibited imports until the 1970s. In some cases, blanket bans were placed upon entire publications, and in others only single volumes were examined and prohibited.

National Archives of Australia acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia and acknowledges their continuing connection to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to the people, their cultures and Elders past, present and emerging.

True Detective Mysteries was founded in 1924 by publisher Bernarr Macfadden.[1] It initially focused on mystery fiction, with a mix of non-fiction crime stories. In the 1930s, Macfadden realized the popularity of the non-fiction pieces and gradually phased out fiction. As such, True Detective Mysteries became the first true crime magazine.[2] In 1941, Macfadden changed the name to True Detective, emphasizing the magazine's move away from mystery fiction.[3]

True Detective's non-fiction stories retained some of the tone and style of noir fiction and mystery writing, laying the ground for subsequent true crime genre conventions.[1] The magazine had few ambitions to purvey serious literature, although it did publish early work by respected writers like Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, and Ann Rule, among others.[4] It appealed to the same working class audience as its pulp fiction competitors and became a massive hit, evidently selling around 2 million copies per month in the 1930s and '40s. Its success inspired many imitators. MacFadden created a sister publication, Master Detective, and around 200 other true crime magazines emerged by the 1960s. Within the genre, True Detective was regarded as the standard bearer of quality and reliability.[5]

The pulp magazine industry declined in the 1960s, out-competed by television and increasingly cheap paperback books.[6] Many magazines went out of business. True Detective continued publication, though with increasingly sensational and sexualized content and declining quality. By the 1980s, it was one of only 11 true crime magazines still in print.[4] The magazine went through several publishers; in 1995, it was bought out by Globe Communications, which shuttered the magazine.[1][4] After the American magazine shut down, British publishers continued True Detective under a new format, with an increased focus on Australian, European, and historical crimes.[4]

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