Revealing Detective Cases Vol. 4 #1 - Feb. 1949

Feb. 1949 - A couple weeks ago, I picked up an excellent book called Cult Magazines: A to Z, an exhaustively-detailed book highlighting just a small slice of all the various cult or underground magazines that have been published since the beginning of the 20th century.

The book was so interesting it made me want to, in the first place, do another week's worth of posts for the blog. It also made me want to expand the blog's reach a bit, and talk about other magazines outside the usual black and white, comic book-formatted ones.

So while I was at the 2009 Wizard World Big Apple Con, among the other mags I bought was this issue of Revealing Detective Cases, one of the approximate ten billion "true crime" mags that were published in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

For those not familiar with these types of mags, they were collections of text stories, accompanied by the occasional photo illustration, all about real life criminals and other nefarious people.

This issue opens up with a full-page ad for Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, underscoring how much the people producing these magazines knew their audience. But then how to account for this ad, on the very next page?:

On the bottom right, it says "Commander Wearers All Over America Say--", followed by testimonials from supposed real-life users of this man girdle. If its so great, then why are all the people cited hiding behind initials?

The first part of the magazine proper is this editorial, posing a startling question:

...I was too scared to find out if I was an actual criminal, so I couldn't bare to finish the piece.

The first true crime case is:

It's followed by another case, called "Scarlet Trail of the Kill and Run Trio", and then this one, my favorite:

Someday, someone has to make a movie called "Doomed Redheads and The Kill-Crazy Don Juan."

Next is "Secret Love Affair of the Strangled Beauty", then a feature called "Behind The 8 Ball", which is, according to the article, a 2-hour(!) educational film shown in New Jersey schools, trying to teach kids that Crime Does Not Pay. Man, I'd kill to see that--only proving the filmmakers' point!

Next is another true crime case, featuring an eerily similar-looking couple:

...what do you expect to happen when you marry your twin sister? Of course there's going to be trouble!

There's another true crime case, "Return of the Prodigal", and then a page of photos of actual, on-the-lam fugitives:

...do you recognize any of these men? That guy with the cigar looks like a prototypical comic book editor of the 1940s. I wonder what happened to these guys?

The rest of the magazine, visually, is drab--its just wrap-ups to all the stories started off in the first half, interspersed with some gag cartoons and lots and lots of ads.

I have to admit, I didn't really bother reading any of the stories, but just a cursory look through the magazine is a great window into a long-forgotten era of America. The criminals in these magazines, while frequently murderers, seem more gentile and colorful than the kind of people a similar magazine produced today would feature. Plus, nowadays you don't have G-Men with snap-brim fedoras, and that's a major loss.


Today's Angelique Trouvere glossy up for grabs: