The History of American Crime

It was Autumn, 1949, and television was yet to absorb the imagination of the "trash culture" segment of the herd. Fortunately, there were plenty of pulp magazines filled with tantalizingly illustrated sensational stories of often questionable veracity. The genre appeared in the mid-1920s with True Crimes Magazine and eventually grew to include over 200 titles.

These three magazines date from September and October of 1949 and are filled with all the pictures of moderate gore and the sleazy advertising the consuming public had come to expect.