True Detective

 

Originally True Detective Mysteries, True Detective ran from 1924-95.  I believe that the UK edition is still being published, (certainly, I recall seeing it on the shelves at WH Smiths fairly recently.  This cover, from March 1957, is from the magazine's peak of popularity and features a cover painting as lurid as would find on any fiction pulp.  Although, in its early days, True Detective did carry fiction, it was the true detective stories which proved most popular.  While the crimes chronicled might have been real cases, they were written up in the most lurid, pulp-style prose possible, focusing on the most sensational details.  Sex crimes seemed particularly popular subjects as the fifties and sixties progressed.  

True Detective effectively established the 'true crime' format, the success of which could be measured by the number of imitators that it spawned over the years.  Moreover, the title has entered the lexicon as a synonym for a particular style of crime writing.  By the fifties, true crime magazines had become, of course, close cousins to the contemporaneous men's magazines (which also often incorporated the word 'True' into their titles and proclaimed their stories to be 'true'.  The reality was that the men's magazines 'true' stories were clearly fabricated, (becoming ever more extravagant and bizarre as time went by), whereas the true crime genre generally did base their content on actual events.  But, as with the men's magazines, the true crime magazines eventually found themselves suffering falling circulations as their readers found themselves able to access much the same content on TV via shows like Unsolved Mysteries.  Indeed, the TV version of the genre continues to thrive, augmented in recent years by the rise of true crime podcasts.  But it is worth remembering that this now semi-respectable genre had its roots in the lurid pages of True Detective.