Cyanide and Sin.

Cyanide and Sin offers a broad history of the true crime magazine in America with an emphasis on the 1950s and on the visual content of these magazines. Will Straw, a scholar in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has written a 12,000 word essay that traces the stylistic and conceptual evolution of the Crime magazine genre. He catalogues specific photographers and key designers who were regular contributors to the various magazines. The book contains 196 images from the true crime genre.

Many of the images reproduced both within these magazines and on their covers were set- up reenactments of crimes, some fictive, others real. Often, the images are accompanied by lurid titles such as: Death Crashes A Party, Love Me or Die!, He Was Too Hot To Cool Down.

There have been numerous publications on the history of pulp and crime fiction. Cyanide and Sin is the first book to look at the true crime magazine and the visuals which were a significant part of its appeal. As Straw writes:

'Crime lent itself readily to some of the most powerful impulses within modern image-making. It gave photographers drawn to social marginality subjects with which to avoid the sentimentality that too easily clings to images of the poor or downtrodden. Crime photography has served as the basis for transgressive violations of good taste, and for romantic glorifications of the doomed life. The images assembled in true crime magazines over their 80 year history have moved ceaselessly between what photographic historian Allan Sekula calls the honorific and repressive functions of photography. Images celebrating an extravagant individuality, for instance, have sat alongside others calling for citizen complicity in the enforcement of state power. '

3000 copies, the entire edition. Designed by Alexander Gelman and Andrew Roth. Yellow wrapper, color photographically illustrated jacket on recto, black and white on verso.
Though there has been a rehabilitation of just about every imaginable genre of pulp/lowbrow culture over the past three decades, no one has really tackled the hermetic world of true-crime magazines, until now. Will Straw's book is, thankfully, visual candy, but it packs a lingering burn too. While its museum-store-worthy design makes it obvious that it's a serious book (one that you don't have to hide before your mother drops by), it's really an act of analysis and an act of homage at one and the same time. The popular true-crime genre, which emerged from 18th- century broadsides and their successors, 19th-century penny tabloids, was reflected in the 1950s in the highbrow world (In Cold Blood), and in more lavish popular fictional entertainments Hitch-cock's Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, or Rear Window, for example). The magazines' lurid, breathless banners (A Private Eye in Sinner's Paradise; Baby, I'd Kill To Keep You; I Was an Easy Money Honey; Hot-Rod Killer Kids; Acid!; Clobbered!), sensational covers, and staged reenactments mixed with actual police photos were stitched together into a bizarro parody of "straight" photo-essay magazines like Life. The readership was enormous until the advent of TV true-crime programs; the last of the original magazines closed its doors in 2000.

Like most pure genres, true-crime is actually a hybrid of its many antecedents, and has closely related siblings (such as true-confession magazines). There are certain contradictions, though. The publishing business was headquartered in urban areas, but the documented cases usually take place in out-of-the-way, windswept country hamlets (think the Bates Motel), or along secluded stretches of road. While each case is unique, most follow the expected roadmap: blood, babes and booze, sprinkled with lead, lucre and palookas. Any larger context that might condition crime is simply assumed, never explained. Individual crimes of passion, preferably with a twist, are the staple, though there are many morality tales that demonstrate how a few wrong decisions lead to lives of vice.

Straw has uncovered a treasure house of little-known images that mimic the gritty look of early Robert Frank, though the stagy sensibility is often pure Weegee. He estimates that, over the fifty-year life of true-crime magazines, five million photographs were added to American visual culture, most uncredited. Who were these unsung artists? What became of them? Acid! Bullets! Booze! Clobbered! PHIL HARRIS