Customer Reviews

Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America

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An interesting, heavily illustrated, look at crime magazines of the fifties. They had always been popular down-market reading and at their most successful, just before the Second World War, True Detective was selling two million copies a month in a market that had over seventy imitators. After the war the genre slowly sank into obscurity until the last of them ceased in 2000. No one misses them though a couple of titles are still published in Britain.

The 196 illustrations are divided into covers, mostly one to a page and sixty-two inside spreads. It's the magazine insides that I found most fascinating and I have to say, having worked as a designer on down-market publications, that so many of the spreads are rather bland and amateurish looking. These magazines had very low editorial budgets with most money being spent on the cover images so that the inside pages had to rely on the creativity of designers using graphic techniques to create visual interest (large headlines, angled photos, type in panels, irregular photo and tone shapes) They all look as if they were churned out month after month for a readership that really wasn't too bothered about what the layouts looked like.

Though the title of the book relates to the fifties the covers and insides start in the forties and the last twenty-three extend into the sixties. You'll be able to see a change in cover style from the earliest with a photo (predictably a female) with one cover line and by the late-fifties this has evolved into busier designs with two or three photos and several cover headlines. The publishers knew exactly what their reader's wanted so that the teaser lines had a strong sexual element like: White Slavers Beat Me, But They Couldn't Silence Me!; PASSION SLAYINGS of the HILL-COUNTRY HELLCAT; DIAL R-A-P-E! The Sex Pervert Has a New Angle; Sex, Schoolbooks, Switchblades. Our children get away with murder! Clearly sex, as always, sells!

Cyanide and Sin visually covers a tiny part of the popular culture market but it can be compared to Taschen's 336 page Detective Magazines (Midi) which I think is much better. Strangely this book isn't mentioned in the Cyanide and Sin Sources page. True Crime/Detective Magazines is a thick chunky hardback with 450 covers (but fewer inside spreads) and a design rather more sympathetic to the subject matter, a lot more information, beautifully produced and at a comparable price, too.

C&S does have an interesting cover that is worth a mention. The book is a trade paperback with a jacket made up of magazine covers and when removed opens to a thirty-four by twenty-one inch poster of covers, with a few repeats. A clever graphic idea for a jacket though you'll have to handle the book carefully because this cover is split into two halves horizontally as it wraps round the book's front and back.

***SEE SOME INSIDE SPREADS by clicking 'customer imahes' under the cover.