True Crime Detective Magazines
(2008 - Taschen)

(edited by Dian Hanson, by Eric Godtland) They stole it ! I think that when mulling over that this book probably shouldn't be up on our List. Yes, Out of 336 pages, 166 could be said to let the art works hold their own or dominate, but so many of those actually have some text with the single, rather smallish, image amid at least a half-page of negative space - pretty frustrating when you are looking for more large reproductions of the art. 58 of those art-pages sport multiple images gathered together (and less ill-used negative space) and many of them don't have image-sizes worth writing home about either. There are just a handful of original paintings on display, the rest of the exhibits being the actual magazine covers themselves, with the logos and all the come-on typography. Anyway, the book's other 172 pages are mostly reproductions of magazine covers that were photographic in nature. To a lesser extent, they let the text dominate or they are reproductions of interior magazine pages. While the magazine True Detective was first published with fiction offerings, it's later dropping of them and focusing on "non-fiction" made it the trailblazer for the new True Crime genre of publications - distinct from the Pulps (Pulp Fiction), though one might want to lump them in the beginnings of the genre of 'Men's Magazines' to follow. The chapters for this overview of the very specific genre are: Detective Magazines-The Perfect Orchid, Smoking!, Sorry-I'm Tied Up Right Now, 1924-1929, 1930-1939, 1940-1949, 1950-1959, 1960-1969, I Was A True Detective Editor, The Artists Who Made Crime Pay, and The Writers Who Brought Death To Life. Don't forget that the text is presented in German & French as well as English. Note that one of the chapters is about the artists, giving thumbnail biographies to those most prolific, or who went on to gain fame in other genres. Now, in that section, and in that section only, the displayed art images are captioned with the artists' name. The entire rest of the book can't be bothered to do this, not even in the rare instance that some idiosyncratic signature is clearly visible. The book is a bit unwieldy, measuring 9-by-10.5 inches and being more than half again too thick for that size. The artists getting what we term a 'well-presented' display are: Walter Darr, Howell Dodd, Monroe Eisenberg, Harry Fisk, F.R. Glass, George Gross (8), Michael McCann, Stockton Mulford (2), O.W.P., Jay Scott Pike, Alec Redmond (2), Fred Rodewald, W. Romaine, John Ruger, Edward Dalton Stevens, Vollmer, Chas Wood, and UNKNOWN ARTIST (80).