The headlines are worth a thesis in themselves. From ‘The Doctor, the Torturers and the Lovestruck Kidnapper’ to ‘I Ate His Brains . . . It was Very Nice’, True Detective and its sister publications, now based in south-east London, have been serving up the grisliest details of crime for nearly a century.
The original True Detective magazine appeared in the United States in 1924 and was swiftly followed by Master Detective. They were the brainchild of an eccentric American publisher called Bernarr Macfadden, who was a keen health and fitness promoter whose other publications included Physical Culture and True Story Magazine. He also launched the Daily Graphic, described by one of its staff as ‘the world’s zaniest newspaper’ and nicknamed the ‘Daily Pornographic’ by its critics. It covered crime in a highly original way: they liked to stage photographic reconstructions of crime scenes such as, in 1926, the hanging of the gangster Gerald Chapman, which they shot in their art department, very nearly hanging a member of the art department by mistake. If a court case involved a woman having to disrobe in any way, the Graphic’s extremely graphic graphic team would helpfully reconstruct the scene.
The True Detective magazines tapped into the contemporaneous American fascination with lawlessness in the Prohibition era, which lasted from 1920 to 1933. It was a world of G-men and guns and hot dames and death row. The magazines ran details of famous murders, illustrated with mug shots and unsparing photos of dead bodies in morgues or at crime scenes. At its height, True Detective reached sales of two million and had writers like Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson as contributors, along with Alan Hynd, Manly Wade Wellman and Walter Gibson. Ann Rule, author of The Stranger Beside Me, about the serial killer Ted Bundy, wrote for the magazine under the pseudonym of Andy Stack. The cartoonist Charles Addams was briefly a staff lay-out artist charged with tidying up the grim photos of murder victims, although he has been quoted as saying that ‘a lot of those corpses were kind of interesting the way they were’.
British crimes featured in the original True Detectives. In 1933, Leslie Randall of the Daily Express wrote ‘The Astonishing Case of Elsie Cameron’ for the magazine, ‘a crime that was destined to shock the British Kingdom’. This was the story of Elsie Cameron, a twenty-six-year-old typist who went missing from her London home, to the distress of her parents. Her disappearance coincided with a shortage of human interest stories in Fleet Street, so a reporter was despatched to Crowborough in Sussex where her fiancé, a poultry farmer called Norman Thorne, lived, to investigate and to challenge the police’s theory that she might have killed herself as she was known to suffer from ‘nerves’. Thorne told the reporter that he was sure some dreadful fate had befallen her and Fleet Street’s crime reporters duly descended en masse. Thorne was a supposedly upright young man, who had known Elsie from Sunday School days, had served in the RAF in the First World War, and belonged, along with Elsie, to the Alliance of Honour, an organisation of young people who pledged themselves to chastity.
What is interesting about the story is that Randall and his fellow crime reporters, clearly suspicious of Thorne, felt that the local Sussex police were not up to the job. A month after Elsie’s disappearance, ‘a party of us drove across country to urge upon the chief constable of Sussex, the necessity of calling in the Yard’. They had their way and ‘ace’ detective Detective Inspector Gillan was despatched from London. The reporters all agreed that ‘if Thorne is guilty, Gillan is the man to make him “squeak”.’ Sure enough, the Yard man soon found a letter from Thorne to another woman with whom he was having an affair, along with letters from poor Elsie, who turned out to be pregnant and expecting marriage to the faithless Thorne. The police started excavating around the chicken run and found Elsie’s head in a biscuit tin.
Randall recalled of the police dig, supervised by Gillan in his trademark derby hat, that ‘reporters, whose cigarettes glowed in the dark, were the only spectators.’ Thorne then claimed that Elsie had hanged herself on his farm and he had then dismembered her body, a tale not swallowed by the police or the Old Bailey jury. Even after Thorne was charged with murder, Randall had access to him and Thorne tried to sell his life story – ‘for a fabulous price’ – to the Daily Express. The case attracted much attention right through the trial, even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near where the murder took place, expressing a ‘faint doubt’ about Thorne’s guilt. Hard to imagine today that a group of crime reporters could persuade a local chief constable that his or her detectives were not up to the job and they should call in the Yard for help.
The success of True Detective led to an avalanche of imitators such as Dime Detective, Thrilling Detective, Startling Detective, Amazing Detective, Official Detective, Complete Detective and Spicy Detective, which sounds as though it should have had a cocktail named after it. They all came with suitably noir cover lines such as ‘Once Over Lightly with Arsenic’ or ‘The Slayer at the Foot of the Cross’. Many of the cover illustrations featured young, scantily-clad women in vulnerable situations and carried headlines like ‘The Little Blonde Goes with Me’ or ‘They Left Her in the Desert to Die’ and had little to do with detective skills, either masterly or amazing. ‘Dickbooks’, as they were called, appealed to many, not least the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who had a subscription from the very first edition. But sales slipped as television started to provide its own form of true crime tales and the American edition of True Detective finally embarked on its own big sleep in 1995. Shiona McArthur, in the book Crime: Fear or Fascination?, cites the attraction of the true crime formula: ‘The narrative voice, influenced by the American crime writing style, is always that of an investigating officer . . . The consumer is addressed as a privileged knowing subject, that is, someone who is something of an expert on murder and violent crime, the details and technical terminology used flatters the reader by implying they are being addressed as fellow experts.’
The format came to Britain in 1950 in the shape of True Detective, which now describes itself as ‘the world’s No. 1 true crime magazine’ and its sidekick, Master Detective. They incorporated some American crimes – obviously a much richer field – along with local cases. In 1981, True Crime Monthly joined them and, in 1991, a quarterly called Murder Most Foul. The formula was, as the publishers described it, ‘top-quality printing along with expertly crafted prose that described in lingering detail some of the more lurid scenes from modern life and all wrapped up in beautifully designed painted covers’. And the publisher’s statement was clear: ‘as readers of the dozens of detective magazines spawned by the True Detective knew full well, the perfect crime simply doesn’t exist. If there was one thing the early detective magazines showed time and again, and month after month, it was that good will almost always prevail over evil.’
Early crimes covered included that of Donald Hume, who later boasted about getting away with the murder of the car dealer Stanley Setty; Thomas Ley, an Australian politician convicted in 1947 of the ‘Chalk-pit Murder’ in Wimbledon of a barman, John Mudie, whom he suspected of being his mistress’s lover and whose body was dumped in a Surrey chalk pit; and Harold Dorian Trevor, a monocled con man with a dozen aliases who spent most of his life in prison, strangled a landlady who had seen him stealing and was hanged in 1942. For many years the magazines were seen prominently on the shelves of local newsagents alongside Tit-Bits, Reveille and Woman’s Own, hitting sales of around 35,000 at their peak. As sales for most print publications declined, the True Crime stable, like the satirical magazine Private Eye, decided to stick to a purely magazine format and eschew the digital world.
The style for all the titles remained fairly standard: glossy colour cover with mug-shots of murderers and the traditional deathless cover lines like ‘Hell’s Kitchen Junkie Cooked Girlfriend Into Soup’, ‘Toy-boy Murdered His Elderly wife – Or Did He?’, ‘Slaughter in the Toilets’ and ‘Who Put Arsenic in the Salmon Sandwiches?’ Inside were articles on past or present crimes, mainly murders, illustrated with photos of crime scenes, corpses and perpetrators. During Hume’s trial at the Old Bailey, the judge held up a copy of the American edition of True Detective containing a story on the case and warned the jury to ignore anything they had read.
True Detective itself featured in a murder trial in 1956 when a bearded young pornographer called Leonard Atter was charged with killing a prostitute, Robina Bolton, who had been found battered to death in her flat in Paddington, west London. He admitted being a regular client and being in her company on the night of the murder but claimed that she had given him tea and sandwiches and asked him to leave before another visitor arrived. A copy of the magazine, which featured on its cover an illustration of a distressed woman being dragged into a car, was found in his flat and the suggestion was made that one of the cases reported in it, which also featured a murdered woman, contained ‘remarkable similarities’ to the killing of Bolton. Atter denied ever having read it, adding that it was not his kind of magazine. He was acquitted on the judge’s direction and the murder remains unsolved.
What the genre perfected was a deadpan style that illustrated the banality of so many murderers. A typical example was ‘Mansfield Shocker: Couple Buried Wife’s Parents in the Garden’, published in True Crime in 2014. This told the story of Susan and Christopher Edwards who murdered the former’s parents, William and Patricia Wycherley, and buried them in their back garden where they lay undiscovered for the next fifteen years. Susan was a librarian and Edwards an accounts clerk, fitting the George Orwell definition of the ideal murderer, who was meant to be a ‘little man of the professional class . . . living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs’.
It was a bizarre story. The couple killed the Wycherleys because they were in debt and to get access to their pensions, which they did successfully for the next fifteen years. It was only when William Wycherley was supposedly about to reach his 100th birthday that suspicions arose, as the Department of Work and Pensions finally decided they needed to interview him to confirm that he was still alive and the Centenarian society wanted to do the same in preparation for his telegram from the Queen. The arrival of the letter indicated to the Edwardses that the game was up so they fled to France where they ran out of money. They then appealed for funds to a relative who alerted the police. They were jailed for life with a minimum sentence of twenty-five years.
There is a staff of seven writers at the stable. Their readers, according to True Crime’s Philip Morton, are ‘marginally more likely to be female than male, and likely to be aged 40 to 70. A recent small survey conducted via our weekly email bulletin seems to back up what we suspected: age range of respondents was 35 to 79, 60/40 female/male.’ What interests their readers most is ‘capital punishment and the crimes that led to it, from both sides of the Atlantic’. Their most notable famous reader was the late television presenter Jeremy Beadle, who once guest-edited an issue of True Detective. Morton says that the stories that provoke the greatest reader response tend to be ‘the ones with connections to other cases – e.g., the observation that the officer who arrested Ruth Ellis – the last woman hanged – was the same officer who had previously arrested Styllou Christofi, the penultimate woman hanged . . . We also tend to receive more mail on modern cases where someone truly despicable (child-killers etc) gets their come-uppance. There seems to be a strong sense of justice, and even retribution, among our correspondents.’ Letters from readers referring to particularly unpleasant criminals that conclude ‘I hope he rots in hell’ would seem to confirm this.
A rival publication, Real Crime, was launched in 2015 by the Bournemouth publisher Imagine, partly in response to the increased interest in true crime online, as evidenced by the enormous interest generated by the Serial podcast and The Jinx documentary mini-series, both of which looked in detail at puzzling murder cases. A glossy, high-quality magazine, it deals with both contemporary and historical crime and numbers among its contributors Seth Ferranti, a former LSD dealer from Virginia who became a writer while serving twenty-one years of a twenty-five-year sentence for drug dealing in the United States.
Real Crime’s editor-in-chief, James Hoare, said that it had a readership of 27,000 and, while the staple remained the detailed cover of murder cases, a new readership was also interested in more contemporary subjects like drugs and the dark net. Research indicated, he said, that the new readership also went for in-depth true crime stories in online outlets like Vice and the Huffington Post. ‘Cannabis, ecstasy and heroin are just a mouse-click away,’ as one of their stories in 2016 put it. But murders on both sides of the Atlantic dominate the publications. As the writers who descended on a street in Gloucester in the 1990s discovered, the appetite for even the grimmest of murders remains undimmed.