Well, here’s something you don’t see every day, even in the world of melodramatic pulp magazine reprints: an Adventure House replica of a 1930s true-crime magazine. It’s called, coincidentally enough, TRUE CRIME MAGAZINE, from November 1936. Ah, 1936 — that was just one year after the deaths of Dutch Schultz, John Dillinger and Ma Barker, and two years after the demise of Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson. I would call the 1930s the golden age of American crime, except that decade gets a lot of competition from the years between 1776-1929, and 1940 to the present.
The surprising thing about the book’s articles is how well-written they are. The replica contains no biographical information about the writers, but my guess is that they were journalists picking up some extra coin. Next time you watch one of those old newspaper movies, like FIVE STAR FINAL or HIS GIRL FRIDAY, listen to the text the reporters dictate over the phone to the copy editors back in the office. What they say sounds just like these pieces read. Here, try this on:
“Nineteen long gashes with a razor, and every one of them was a shocking wound it itself. Not one was less than an inch deep, many deeper. They laid bare the bluish white living bone, and they severed nerves and veins and arteries.
“Nobody slept on Kingsway that night. Nobody could. The men on deck stuffed cotton in their ears; the men in their berths pulled blankets over their heads. But they couldn’t close out those piercing shrieks which ran through the listless ship with the drooping canvas.”
That’s from “Murder Rides the Waves” by Joseph Harrington. Many a horror writer in 2009 wishes s/he could get under your skin so well. I think it’s the word “shrieks” instead of “screams.” “Shrieks” is scarier.
The lead story — the one depicted on the cover — tells of a man who attempted murder by putting rattlesnakes in a box, drugging his woman, and forcing her to stick her foot into the container. “Los Angeles’ Rattlesnake Poison Murder Case” is by “Pacific Coast Reporter” Excalibur. I wonder if this is a woman hiding her gender because of the genre. When Ann Rule began writing this kind of stuff as late as 1969, she disguised her sex behind the masculine pseudonym Andy Stack.
The article also contains many veiled and not-so-veiled references to abnormal sex practices and incest between the killer and his niece. That may not be a real clue to the author’s gender — although women are generally the audience for true crime and horror — because at least half of this issue’s stories deal with lust crimes. One of the most interesting is “America’s Tragedies: A Study in Murder Parallels” by Billy Sunday. It begins with a brief recap of the Chester Gillette case — the one on which Theodore Dreiser based his novel AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY — and concludes with a more recent (to 1936) but similar affair. Sandwiched between is the sordid tale of Bobby Edwards who, like Gillette, drowned one sweetheart so he’d be free to marry another.
A real gangster yarn comes to us via the life of Tony “The Stinger” Cugino, who rose through the educational ranks of reformatories and prisons, to the white slave trade, to contract murder. His story is told by Kent Allerton Hunter.
In all, the book contains 10 full-length narratives and one long editorial arguing against the validity of the insanity defense. If none of the writers actually were women, the fairer sex certainly made up a significant percentage of the magazine’s readership. The ad pages are loaded with commercials for products and services for the gals, including five ads in five pages with these enticing headlines: “Late? Overdue Women Find Quick RELIEF,” “Women! Delayed?,” “One Woman to Another, When Troubled with Delay,” “Ladies Only! Delayed?” and “Delay Never Worries Me.” Something tells me these had nothing to do with the former House Majority Leader from Texas.
TRUE CRIME MAGAZINE for November 1936 is wonderfully entertaining in its own sordid way. True-crime buffs will love it. Everyone else will, too, though they won’t be as willing to admit it. —Doug Bentin
