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.”