Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Memory and the Angels: An Introduction

Maybe you’ve seen the magazine before? You know, the one with buxom babes in skimpy get-ups holding only the most lethal weapons — AK-47s, Uzis, Glocks, Colt 45s — a different girl, a different gun. And maybe you’ve glanced at the headlines that surround the girls. Lurid, titillating rapid-fire headlines like “She was hot enough to lure her victim and COLD ENOUGH TO KILL!” or “Pittsburgh sleuths winced at the bodies and agreed it was NO WAY FOR THE SWEET OLD FOLKS TO DIE!”

Perhaps you’ve even dared to open a copy? If so, you’ve no doubt read about a handyman, a dishwasher, a baby-sitter, a schoolteacher — an everyday ordinary “Joe,” who for some reason — you fill in the blank — snapped and turned into a fiendish, raving, cold-blooded killer. And you’ve read about the hard-nosed detective who battled against high odds to bring the homicidal maniac to justice.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about True Detective, a magazine not on the margins of respectable popular culture but clear off the page. Once it was a cornerstone of a popular pulp culture and featured writing by some of the boldest authors of its day. But that culture has long since vanished. And while True Detective survives, it has been relegated to the back of the lowliest newsstands, the low-rent section, just behind Tattoo Times, just in front of Superstars of Wrestling.

It wasn’t on the newsstand that I first discovered True Detective, but at the Old Worthington Barbershop on High Street back in Columbus, Ohio. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven, but I still recall the nightmares — especially one about a shoelace strangler who did in a handful of coeds out in the heartland. I was terrorized but I kept reading, and as I reached my teenage years, my parents and teachers considered sitting me down on the couch as my appreciation for the magazine’s cheap and gaudy pages grew into an obsession. Finally, twenty-two, idealistic, and fresh out of college, I ditched plans to go to graduate school so I could pursue higher learning, pulp-style. I became the managing editor of True Detective and its sister titles, Master Detective, Official Detective, Inside Detective, and Front Page Detective.

It was 1988. For most in the business of crime, that was a good year. People were desperate. Times were violent. Uncertain. The stock market had crashed. Crack had hit the streets. Dozens of serial killers stalked the country hunting for prey. Mass murderers spontaneously erupted with alarming frequency: reports had it that about once a week someone killed more than four people at a time. And there were several new and improved ways to die: at the hands of carjackers, in drive-bys, as a mushroom victim, in kiss-eye killings. Things were so bad this nation even managed to elect a president based in part on trumped-up, racist commercials featuring Willie Horton, the Massachusetts man who, as a prisoner during the term of Michael Dukakis, was given a weekend furlough while serving a sentence for first-degree murder, only to resurface in Maryland where he raped a woman and tortured her fiancé.

Struggling to keep pace with this whirling frenzy of violence the true crime genre began to flourish. Books like Ann Rule’s Small Sacrifices, Joe McGinnis’s Blind Faith, and Jack Olson’s Cold Kill soared to the top of best-seller lists. New tabloid shows dealing in murder and mayhem and scandal and sleaze, like “A Current Affair” hit television airwaves with a vengeance. So did reality-based crime shows like “Unsolved Mysteries” and “America’s Most Wanted,” which urged viewers to “Watch TV–Catch Criminals.” Miniseries “inspired by actual events” emerged as a tool for networks during sweeps periods when ratings are essential in the pricing of commercials. And two notable movies based on real life cases were theatrically released: The Thin Blue Line, Erroll Morris’s weighty documentary about a Texas man falsely imprisoned for killing a cop, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, John McNaughton’s stark, unflinching account of Henry Lee Lucas, possibly the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States, and his furl-loving accomplice Ottis Toole.

One might think the same impulse that brought these latter-day true crime forms to prominence would’ve also benefited True Detective. After all, they were our descendants, modern equivalents of what we had been doing for a long time. It wasn’t to be.

True Detective's Manhattan headquarters were on the twentieth floor of a dilapidated, prewar Hell’s Kitchen office building. They were a grim, unhappy place, for the future of the magazine was very much in doubt.

The detective titles were owned by RGH Publications, a father and son corporation. Even without the luxury of promotion and publicity, and with covers so shoddily produced they could only scare readers off, about 500,000 diehards still purchased the magazines every month. But our readership of blue hairs, shut-ins, Greyhound bus riders, cops and axe-murderers was growing old and dying fast.

The magazines turned a profit, but it was becoming an increasingly small one, especially since our kindly, withered, little ad man now found it impossible to place ads from the tobacco and liquor companies. Instead, he searched lower. Much lower. The back page was reserved for our biggest advertiser who sold fake speed which could make you “Explode with Energy.” Other ads were 900 numbers and sex manuals for those who craved the pleasures of the flesh after reading about bone-chilling violence; mail-order courses teaching promising careers like how to be a private eye, a locksmith, a wig salesman; and for the lonely hearts, “Jewels of the Orient” and “Untouched Island Girls.”

To keep the magazine afloat, the staff was pared down to the absolute minimum. Just six editors put out five magazines a month.

My boss was Art Crockett. Pushing seventy, he wore a fedora over his horseshoe of hair and a cardigan vest over white starched shirts. He walked with a cane, had a lame eye, a wisecrack for every occasion, and a two-pack-a-day cough though he’d recently cut down to a half a pack a day. Doctor’s orders.

If Art looked and acted the part of the wizened, old, tough-guy editor, he had a right to. He had lived the life.

Raised a few blocks up from our office, Art received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart as a radioman with the 100th Infantry Division in World War II. After his discharge, he worked a series of unsatisfying jobs — in a salt factory, a refrigeration plant, and as an elevator repairman. Then, with a wife and two kids to support, Art quit his day job, rolled the dice, and began hammering out plots fast and for money — a penny a word.

His first stories appeared in second-generation detective fiction pulps like Manhunt, Pursuit, Menace, and Conflict. In the early 1960s, he edited a bizarre string of sex-cum-violence magazines, unreasonable facsimiles of legitimate men’s adventure titles like Argosy and True that featured lavishly illustrated covers of dolled-up girl-Nazis equipped with leather, whips, and chains. When they folded, Art left for the greener pastures of the True West publications. It was a short stay, for they, too, closed up shop, and when they did he turned to True Detective.

Art was a man of considerable literary talent although thirty-five years of high-speed writing had taken its toll. When necessary, he could still knock out a masterful yarn. Mostly, he just churned out tawdry blurbs and titles on his Royal manual, circa 1936, something he could do like nobody’s business. (“The poor joker on the floor was literally beaten to death. That was bad enough. But what his blood-dimmed eyes beheld before the end came may have been even worse.” Or “It was the ultimate humiliation for the man who was obsessed with sex, and no power on earth could stop her as she approached him with her menacing knife.”)

Most of the stories in the magazine were composed by moonlighting reporters around the country, cops or former cops, and freelancers. Despite preposterous conditions, a handful managed to be quite good: Joseph Koenig (author of Little Odessa), Ann Rule (one a prolific contributor who had since hit it big and now wrote only sparingly), and Charles Sasser and John Dunning (both authors of many crime paperbacks, both fact and fiction). All turned out consistently action-packed, adventurously told yarns.

But most had been trucking along far too long to care. All-time pulp great Jack Heise had been two-fingering ten stories a month from his mobile home in Spokane, Washington, since 1936. And Bud Ampolsk, Bill Kelly, Bill Cox, and Walt Hecox each had spent thirty-five years in the trenches. As a writer, inspiration was hard to find, especially after all those years. It was even harder when one had to write on the fly just to survive: 5,000 words fetched $250 in 1988, or $50 less than writers made during the darkest days of the depression.

I loved True Detective dearly and with all my heart. I wished more people read it, and was bitter that they didn’t. But there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it. Facts were facts, and the fact was, our Golden Age had ended forty years earlier, and the magazine was a far cry from its former glory.

True Detective was founded in 1924 by physical fitness fanatic Bernarr Macfadden, a man of singular creative genius and imagination, one of the major publishers of the first half of this century. For Macfadden, truth was always stranger than fiction. It was also more lucrative. Having already made a mint on reality-based true confession — style publications like True Story, True Romance, and True Experiences, he fashioned True Detective as a magazine that would realistically portray a world marked by chaos and uncertainty.

With prohibition in full swing, the 1920s were violent times much like our own, and the magazine derived its plot material from these horrors of everyday life. Hyperreal, True Detective was democratic in spirit in much the same way Dashiell Hammett, Carrol John Daly, and Erie Stanley Gardner were. In 1924, these authors were revolutionizing the detective fiction story in the pages of Black Mask — and in the words of Raymond Chandler were giving “murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand.”

From the get-go, the magazine ran stories about real kidnappings, bank scams, forgeries, art thefts, cons, and swindles; but its specialty was always murder, and no matter where you lived, it was always too close to home. You could be one of humanity’s rejects or beneficiaries — a ritzy socialite, a bored housewife, a bell boy, a bartender, a truck driver, a farmer, a gambler, or a bum — and still be a killer and still be killed. Murder happened by day or by night, and it happened anyplace — on the waterfront or a lonesome desert highway, at an amusement park or a rail yard, in an Appalachian shack or a Park Avenue flat. But most shocking, murder in True Detective, just as in real life, could happen for chillingly commonplace reasons — for chump change, for looking at someone wrong, just for the thrill of it, or for no apparent reason at all.

The 25-cent journey Macfadden offered into this dark, shadowy, frequently harrowing, always brutal world was fascinating. Its bodies and blood grotesquely real, it was also pretty damn scary. Macfadden realized this. He also knew that most of his readers, the same people for whom crime was the biggest threat, wanted their fears alleviated by the end of the story, no matter how horrible the crime or how formidable the criminal. That’s why he dictated that justice would always prevail, that the criminal must always get his comeuppance at the hands of a heroic officer of the law.

And some heroes they were, these “clever, brainy, and brave men,” who in the words of Macfadden, “investigate bizarre crimes committed by cunning men who leave no clues behind them...” and “take the tangled knot of circumstances in their hands and slowly, patiently, unravel all its twistings and windings, until finally the great secret is disclosed and the criminal is brought to justice.”

Stories were based on fact, but there was always a fantastic element to this police work, especially when you consider the magazine’s heroes were deputies, detectives, fingerprint experts, and prosecutors from two-bit towns across the country. In real life, some of these law officers may have been tough, hard, and determined — in True Detective they all were... always.

Critics dismissed the magazine as low brow and low down: some were troubled by its savage, unrelenting violence; others by its hybrid form (not journalism and not fiction) and penchant for purple prose; others still by its formula, which unrealistically, in their opinion, transformed cops into superheroes. But readers flocked to it — and it is estimated that True Detective sold close to two million copies a month during its heyday.

The magazine was also a big hit with publishers, who found its formula easy to knock off and imitated it by the score. In all, some seventy-five magazines were developed, magazines that covered the same cases, used the same artists and designers, and posed the same models in elaborate reenactments of the crimes. Indeed, they were so similar from one to the next that even their titles blur together: Daring Detective, Shocking Detective, Startling Detective, Big Book Detective, Detective World, Underworld Detective, Headline Detective, Headquarters Detective, Dragnet Detective, Complete Detective, Homicide Detective, Confidential Detective, 10 True Crime Cases, True Police Cases, to name but a few.

Hundreds of writers were kept busy during this boom time trying to satisfy readers’ bloodlust. They had to type fast. Crime junkies were out stalking newsstands waiting for every issue. As many as ten million copies a month were snatched off shelves before spiraling inflation, mismanagement, television, and paperback books all but killed off the genre in the early 1950s.

From a literary point of view, the majority of the stories from these pulps of old don’t command our attention. Most were pounded out by talentless, no-name hacks who brought little creativity to the genre. Others were written by well-known, much respected true crime reporters like Edward Radin, Alan Hynd, and John Bartlow Martin. While their stories often fascinate, one must look past a style more closely resembling journalism, one that seems dated, its prose ponderous and clunky.

Side by side with these stories appeared others by a different group of authors, who brought to the genre the best of the novelistic imagination and the kind of reportage only a journalist can provide. This bold crew is best known for their detective fiction — and if some of the names surprise you, that is because only one, Jim Thompson, has any true crime in print today.

Long lost are stories by American crime noir writers Robert Bloch, Charles Burgess, Harlan Ellison, Robert Faherty, Bruno Fischer, Day Keene, Lionel White, and Harry Whittington, and mainstream mystery authors such as Leslie Ford, Brett Halliday, Dashiell Hammett, Erie Stanley Gardner, Nunnally Johnson, Eleazar Lipsky, Stuart Palmer, Patrick Quentin, Craig Rice, Lawrence Treat, and S. S. Van Dyne.

History was never kind to the true crime pulps, and it hasn’t been kind to these stories. Considered instantly disposable entertainment even by pulp standards, little effort was made to preserve them, even by the Library of Congress which deemed only True Detective and Master Detective worthy of preservation. As a result, these writings have previously been hard to find. A few appear in little-known, now much sought-after paperbacks. Most have never before been reissued. They’ve been available only in the true crime pulps in which they originally appeared — their paper brown and brittle with age and found only at junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets and in the hands of private collectors.

Casting light on their most notorious fiction while reporting on some of the biggest cases of their day, these true crime gems by the masters of detective fiction are unearthed and collected for the first time in Murder Plus.

While some were already writing on all eight cylinders most were just off the starting line when these stories appeared. An excellent training ground, the willing pupil could learn many of the skills needed to write engaging fiction, such as how to plot events into a fast-paced narrative, develop and personify a character who might only exist in bones and scant remembrances, provide the right detail to capture time and place, and shift points of view while advancing a story every step of the way.

Like the game of chess, mastery was complex, but the rules were simple and unchangeable. Stories had to keep to the facts and be easy to follow, unpretentious, and definitely not experimental. Editors strove for stylistic conformity and kept blue pencils on their desk, sharp and ready. Those looking to recast the formula did so by degrees. A writer who stepped too far out of line learned quickly which conventions could be toyed with and which could not. And those who didn’t learn went hungry.

Reporting on these crimes not only provided writers with skills they could use, but it also gave them scores of actual material they could use in their fiction: fascinating characters with odd quirks and traits, plot devices, settings, and scenarios. And many of them did.

Robert Bloch acknowledges this debt in a remarkable story entitled “The Shambles of Ed Gein,” in which he tells how he based his 1959 classic novel Psycho on Gein, a necrophiliac with a sharp wit and an even sharper knife. In Dashiell Hammett’s “Who Killed Bob Teal?” one discovers an odd plot turn he would later use to great effect in the Maltese Falcon. While one needn’t be familiar with Jim Thompson’s unforgettable novels to appreciate “The Case of The Catalogue Clue,” one might recognize the chatty sheriff, the scheming bellboy, the unloved wildcatter and the once pastoral, now booming West Texas town. Each reappears some twenty years later in books like The Killer Inside Me and Wild Town. And then there’s Harry Whittington, “The King of the Paperback Originals,” whose practically immoral “Invaders from the Sky” may just be the perfect true crime story. He would go on to base his 1960 novel The Devil Wears Wings on this case about two hard-luck pilots who swoop down from the skies to rob banks and reclaim their pride.

It is inevitable that the law and order message is the one that sounds the loudest in these stories. Had it not they never would have been published in the first place. But in some of the most audacious works, other voices can be heard under its din.

Some are the agonizing, barely distilled cries of victims like Pauline Sokolowska, who is killed for the shabbiest of reasons in Leslie Ford’s “Scar-Faced Fugitive and the Murdered Maid.” While her life and death might never be the stuff of fiction, the cruel poignancy of her murder shows through in these blood-dripped pages.

And then there are those in which we hear the tormented, tortured voices of raging psychopaths for whom killing is out of their control. Lionel White, who is best remembered for meticulously plotted caper novels like The Killing and Death Takes the Bus, here gives us the truly horrifying “Case of the Poison Pen.” This lean, terse, and unrelenting story features a frail, hardworking, Bible-thumping widow who kills — and in most hideous fashion — because she only wants the best for her son. And Bruno Fischer, whose moody, gloomy paperbacks of the 1950s always centered on lonely and confused men, here tells the story of a man who finally goes over the edge after five years of “twisting, brooding jealousy.” In both cases, the cops eventually get their man, but the reader gets no peace of mind. The stories are too violent, too close to home, their endings too obviously tacked on for the sake of the genre.

Even police procedurals by some of these noted authors cut like a knife. In lesser hands the cops may have been drab or cartoonishly heroic. Here they’re fully realized, lifelike, even fallible. Lawrence Treat’s fictional police stories have dazzled readers since the late 1940s. In “Body in Sector R,” we follow an unglamorous New York City cop on the trail of a killer in his first big murder investigation. And in very different fashion, Erle Stanley Gardner, best known as the creator of the Perry Mason books series, recounts the details of the murder of film director William Desmond Taylor. This story can only be called a procedural by default, since it’s generally agreed the police never really investigated the case properly at all.

Humor was another editorial taboo. Normally, the magazines were grim and earnest, as straightlaced and straight-faced as J. Edgar Hoover. Yet humor — sometimes black, sometimes slapstick — drifts through some of the finest of these stories, and it only goes to point up man’s inability to know and control his fate. Harlan Ellison’s irrepressibly sardonic wit is a mainstay in his extraordinary crime novels and it turns up, too, in “Mystery Man Lucks and His Missing Bucks,” the story of a con man extraordinaire “with a caravan of beautiful women any Sheik would shriek for.” And Craig Rice, the first lady of hard-boiled fiction, doesn’t let the odd and sordid facts in the enigmatic Wynekoop case get her down in her flawless, tragicomic treasure, “Murder in Chicago.”

This is not a historical project and I’ve chosen to present only works that have stood the test of time. In place of brand-name writers who never mastered the form, I’ve included stories by some who never achieved fame for their fiction and stories by others who were once well known but whose stars have since dimmed. Among them, there is Charles Burgess, whose 1960 novel The Other Woman is long forgotten, but whose frightening portrait of a New Orleans man possessed by redheads merits closer inspection; D. L. Champion, who gave us some of the most unusual private eyes ever published in the pages of Black Mask, here writes about a hefty, turn-of-the-century black widow, a story which is bound to give you (as it did me) the chills; and Robert Faherty, author of Swamp Babe, writes of a man obsessed by the tango, and the misstep that led him to the scaffold. In this same light I’ve included “A Shot in the Dark” by Nunnally Johnson. Best known for his work as a scriptwriter and director, although he did write mysteries early in his career, his droll account of thievery among the rich and famous on Long Island deserves to be exhumed from the dust that has covered it for sixty-seven years. And, finally, one concession has been made to history, and that is S. S. Van Dine’s “Germany’s Mistress of Crime.” Delightfully odd, this story is based on fact and is told through the eyes of Van Dine’s masterfully foolish, fictional sleuth, Philo Vance.

It is unlikely most writers looked upon these works as art, but rather a quick way to turn back nervous creditors while waiting for a royalty check to come in. It is interesting to note that only two of the major authors in this collection, Jim Thompson and Lionel White, stayed with true crime for long. Most published sparingly, a handful of stories tops, before moving on to bigger, more lucrative markets.

It may have been just as well. The line between a first-rate and a cut-rate true crime story was fine. Editorial demands could often crush a fledgling writer’s style as well as aid it. And the relatively easy money could lead a writer to grow stale before he hit the big time, just like the boxer who leaves his best fights in the gym and fails to show up for the main event. (That’s what happened to Jack Heise. His stories from 1936 were written with uncommon energy and care. By 1940, they were strictly formula and some 52 years later, well, I’m sure you can imagine).

Whatever their intentions, one can’t deny their achievements. While the genre was rigid, and editors unforgiving, the stories I have detailed, and others that you are about to read, show writers trying valiantly — and sometimes successfully — to rise above the limits of the formula without destroying it. And in the final analysis this might be the true crime pulp’s greatest legacy. It asked for little, but its built-in drama provided a forum for writers to produce fresh and disturbing stories that live on to this day.

Today, True Detective and its sister titles survive without me. I now work for Americas Most Wanted, where I write reenactments. They like to tell me my job is to catch criminals. I prefer to think I’m helping to keep the spirit of the pulps alive in this electronic age.

And, sadly, the magazines live on without Art Crockett, too. A heart attack claimed this man of quiet dignity on June 23, 1990. He never saw Murder Plus, but I know it would have brought him much happiness.

Art always had a soft spot for redheads. Redheads like this volume’s covergirl and Rose Mandelsberg-Weiss — better known as the “Queen of the Dickbooks,” under whose keen and watchful eyes the editorship has been entrusted. And a fine job she’s doing. Thanks to her, the magazines are starting to make a wonderful comeback.

Perhaps, they will someday enjoy a second Golden Age.

I hope so.

Until then, fix yourself a stiff drink, relax, and enjoy these stories of old.

Just don’t forget to lock your doors.