by MATTHEW HAYS

The representation of violent crime has always fascinated Will Straw. A professor in the communication studies program at McGill University, Straw says he found his interest piqued when he came across New York crime magazines from the ’50s. “I loved the art, and was intrigued by the culture of sensationalism,” he says.

Straw did what any red-blooded culture vulture would do: he began to collect the magazines, buying them up wherever he could find them. “To me, the images in these magazines, in particular on their covers, is really what’s amazing. The articles themselves are actually kind of boring. But the magazines were supposedly about true crimes that actually happened, while the photos themselves were all staged.”

Straw now has approximately 600 of the magazines in his collection, and a selection of those has been reproduced in his new book, Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America (PPP Editions, $60).

The headlines on these covers are pretty crazy alone, with titles like “Death Crashes A Party,” or “Love Me or Die!” or “He Was Too Hot To Cool Down.” But beyond their obvious camp value, Straw feels the images say something about America’s changing attitudes towards crime, something he outlines in his introductory essay.

“There was this whole industry of staging crime scenes for photographs in New York,” Straw says, incredulously. “Models were doing a shoot like this in the morning and then heading off to model clothes in the afternoon.”

Straw says crime magazines began to see a shift as the ’40s drew to a close. “In the’40s, women were all made up to look very glamorous, like they were movie stars. They were usually captured in a head-and-shoulders shot. In the ’50s, things became darker—shots were made to look far more realistic, in stark black-and-white shots. It was an attempt to appear more honest or real in the reporting. The covers were realistic, glamorous and sleazy all at once. What more could you want?”

Unearthing the real ’50s

Straw says the images typified attitudes of the period. This was the decade when Senator Joseph McCarthy attempted to wash the U.S. clean of communist and socialist influences, and Straw says this concept, of uncovering or writing an exposé, ran throughout the crime mags as well. “Concern with uncovering urban vice at the time ran high, this idea of getting at a hidden truth, of exposing violence and corruption.”

Perceptions of the ’50s are often strangely distorted, Straw notes. “People tend to misread the ’50s as some sort of Leave-it-to-Beaverland. The baby boomers tend to think of it as a time before liberation, as though no one had sex until 1967. People think of Happy Days when they think of this decade. But there was great unrest in the ’50s. The civil rights unrest began then, women’s roles were changing because of the war and the gay rights movement was just beginning. There was a great interest in deviant crime.” Thus the popularity of these magazines, many of which were published by large companies like Dell and Fawcett.

Interestingly enough, Straw points out that the crime hysteria portrayed in the magazines is entirely white. “There’s not one black criminal depicted,” he says. “And I really couldn’t arrive at a theory as to why.”

But as the decade came to a close and the ’60s arrived, Straw says certain events had crept into the American psyche. In particular, the popularity of Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood was leading to a new anxiety: an increasingly urban populace began to fear the thought of rural crime. “There were more and more stories in these magazines about remote white crime. It was right around the time that Psycho was released, and a small town in rural Alabama had become a strange and exotic place for an urban population.”

Straw says that overall, the photographing of crime allowed the photographers and the art directors a way to focus on marginalized figures, while violating notions of good taste and romanticizing the “doomed life.” The shoots, he says, “were actually quite elaborate. The studios where they were done must have been an interesting place to work.”