True crime and not being able to tell the good guys from the bad guys -- Garbo

Many years ago, I was scanning the magazine rack at the 2nd Street Kroger in Bl;oomington, Indiana and my eye was caught by a true-crime pulp magazine, the kind of thing that inspired the title of the the HBO series "True Detective." I'd meant to buy Dell's monthly Horoscope magazine, but got the detective pulp mag instead. I thought it would be retro and funny, like a Memory Lane trip to the scandalous movie magazines my mom would guiltily buy and read. 

But this magazine I'd just bought from the grocery store periodical rack was creepy. And compelling. I read the whole thing cover to cover. Couldn't stop myself, though it was all making me feel a bit ill.

  Though the stories pretended to be from the point of view of law enforcement and/or a concerned public at risk, each tale of murder -- almost always the murder of a woman or teenage girl -- took you step by step through the planning and execution of the crime. One really got the sense that these grim tales of lives-gone-wrong were almost like individual how-to manuals. It didn't help that the ads offered mail-order sales -- no internet yet -- of items like police-style handcuffs and realistic badges one could pin the inside of one's wallet. Fake traffic-stop kidnapping, anyone?

 I found the Jekyll-and-Hyde approach to the crime stories so disturbing that I ended up writing both an academic paper and an article for a local arts magazine about the handful of detective magazines I went back to buy at the grocery store to make sure they were all built on this foundation of pretending the reader is being the cop while actually helping this eager consumer learn to the be the (never-daught) killer. Yep, they were. They all were all exactly like that.

I stumbled into that research and writing project about forty years ago, and then forgot about it until this winter, when I bumped into the mention of the Confidential book series, edited by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer.  Here's the first book in the series, published in the late Forties.

I think you can see from the lurid cover above and the detailed map on the back of the dust jacket below that New York: Confidential! sends the same kind of message-under-a-message I saw in those old detective pulp magazines.  The book is warning Mr. Average Reader about the wild life in "the big city after dark," and yet literally giving him a map. There's some ridiculous b.s. slang and "insider info" about how not to seem like a rube, but the reader could have gotten the same information about how much to tip a taxi driver in a regular tourist's guide to New York City. And the authors can skim quickly by with a simple "Hell, you're a guy in the know" attitude. I suppose a lot of the readers, in 1952, were in the military during the Second World War or in Korea, and they'd seen the world.

And yet, how could you realistically expect to find gambling dens and high-class discreet sex workers by using a book with the addresses printed in it?  And yet this reader is ready to show up and pass himself off as a native New Yorker or at least a guy who's seen the grittier side of life? Also, I thought this stuff was bad and everybody wanted better policing and less corruption and...  Kinda makes my head spin, I must say.

 

Dizzy head or not, we're moving on. After New York: Confidential! came these two volumes. Our public library had very worn copies of Chicago Confidential and Washington Confidential. (The exclamation mark was gone by the second book in the series.) The latter had originally come with a very bright dust jacket, as I found when I bought a second-hand copy for myself.

 

Washington: Confidential had appeared in 1950, and two years later U.S.A. Confidential was published.  

 

I was very surprised to read, in Robert McParland's 2018 book Bestseller: A Century of America's Favorite Books, that U.S.A, Confidential sold two million copies within a few weeks of its publication, and was one of the top five bestselling nonfiction books in 1952. I wasn't not aware of the book series until it was referenced by something else I was reading a few months ago.

 But I did know about Confidential scandal magazine, which grew out of the popularity of the Lait/Mortimer book series  There's actually a book about the magazine's history called Confidential Confidential, which I just love.

 

The book is one of the sources I used for the next couple of posts I've got for you, continuing with who created all this "confidential" stuff, and what happened to them. 

Next week:  Part 2!