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.
Robert Bloch
Today, serial killers seem to be springing up across the American landscape as often as McDonald’s franchises — but Ed Gein, serial killer 1950s variety, was a pioneer in the field. Gein’s grim legacy had a profound influence on many writers, including Thomas Harris, author of Silence of the Lambs. Harris recently acknowledged he based many of Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lechter’s peculiar traits on Gein. But Robert Bloch was there first. An expert in the art of terror, Bloch has written hundreds of short stories since the late 1930s, and twelve of his best, including “Fat Chance,” “Frozen Fear,” and “Impractical Joker,” appear in Chamber of Horrors (Award, 1966). He’s gone on to write quite a few novels, films, and TV scripts, but his blessing and his curse are that he will forever be remembered for one book based on Gein, his 1959 classic, Psycho.
The Shambles of Ed Gein
“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places,” wrote H. P. Lovecraft in the opening of his story, “The Picture in the House.” “For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouse of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.”
Lovecraft’s tale then goes on to describe a visit to one of these “silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods” inhabited by a weird eccentric whose speech and dress suggest origins in a bygone day. An increasingly horrible series of hints culminates in the revelation that the inhabitant of the house has preserved an unnatural existence for several centuries, sustaining life and vigor through the practice of cannibalism.
Of course it’s “only a story.”
Or — is it?
On the evening of November 16, 1957, visitors entered an ancient, lonely farmhouse — not in backwoods New England but in rural Wisconsin. Hanging in an adjacent shed was the nude, butchered body of a woman. She had been suspended by the heels and decapitated, then disemboweled like a steer. In the kitchen next to the shed, fire flickered in an old-fashioned potbellied stove. A pan set on top of it contained a human heart.
The visitors — Sheriff Art Schley and Captain Lloyd Schoephoester — were joined by other officers. There was no electricity in the darkened house and they conducted their inspection with oil lamps, lanterns, and flashlights.
The place was a shambles, in every sense of the word. The kitchen, shed, and bedroom were littered with old papers, books, magazines, tin cans, tools, utensils, musical instruments, wrapping paper cartoons, containers, and a miscellany of junk. Another bedroom and living room beyond had been nailed off; these five rooms upstairs were nailed off and deserted.
But amidst the accumulated debris of years in the three tenanted rooms, the searchers found:
two shin bones;
a pair of human lips;
four human noses;
bracelets of human skin;
four chairs, their woven cane seats replaced by strips of human skin;
a quart can, converted into a tom-tom by skin stretched over both top and bottom;
a bowl made from the inverted half of a human skull;
a purse with a handle made of skin;