For sale is an original back issue for HEADQUARTERS DETECTIVE Magazine for July 1949. True Crime cases straight from the Police Blotter. The feature story for this pulp crime periodical was “Boudoir Riddle of the Reluctant Redhead”. The front cover has some surface defects. The back cover and the last few pages have tattered edges. A great ephemera collectible. This 98-page issue also includes fantastic adverts and the following sensational articles:
Who Murdered the Philadelphia Hot-Cha Girl
Blood Rite of the Scourges of Satan
Curious Case of the Missing Mistress
Death Checks-in at the Hotel New Yorker
As recently as the 1970s, fact crime magazines were a significant, if not reputable, segment of the publishing industry. No liquor store magazine rack was complete without the lurid covers of True Detective warning of a “Sex Freak on the Prowl” or promising to reveal the scoop “Behind California’s Latest Mass Murder Case.” A fully stocked newsstand could feature perhaps as many as two dozen different titles every month. Yet this apparently healthy showing on the news racks was only masking the death throes of one of the great genres of exploitation magazines. Within a decade, they had vanished from the national consciousness. When the grand dame of the genre, True Detective, finally suspended publication in 1996, most people though it had died years ago. It was a sad but hardly surprising end to one of the great genres of American exploitation magazine publishing.
