journal of visual culture Books Will Straw, Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America. New York: PPP Publications/Andrew Roth Gallery, 2006.192 pp. 194 col. illus. ISBN 9780971548046 In the film Peeping Tom a pinup photographer attaches a mirror and a switch blade to the front of his camera. He entraps the girls and rushes upon them, driving the knife into their throats while attempting to record their fears. Do the readers of true crime magazines want to imagine themselves as powerful (or powerless), to visualize one’s own or another’s death, or to confront one’s moral codes and their limits? Or is it simply a way to experience camp – a chance to step outside the grind and be a flaneur in the sensationalistic world of urban poverty, sexual license and night time vice? Or are true crime’s charms largely aesthetic? Crime may organize much of 20th-century visual culture, serving as ‘a point of intersection in the traffic between avantgarde and commercial imagery, between popular and fine art traditions’ (p. 16). In their 1950s heyday, true crime magazines created a uniquely arresting visual language out of modernist abstraction, documentary realism, and German expressionism. Will Straw’s Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America is the best place to consider these questions. It contains 196 pics and is preceded by a 12,000 word introductory essay. True crime is crime that ‘really’ happened: as a popular print genre it focuses not on crime’s range or its role in society, but rather on the sensational, especially abductions, rapes and murders of white women. Over 80 years, true crime magazines circulated five million pictures around the globe through more than 200 titles (p. 4). The sheer scope of the magazines’ distribution asks us to place these images in what Tom Cohen calls ‘an archaeology of image culture’ (2005: xii). As Straw points out, the visuality of true crime is peculiar to itself – the genre looks like none other: the tone often vacillates wildly between sensationalism and earnest exhortation. True-crime cover artists were under pressure. Crime photos can be boring – a deserted street where the incident took journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] Copyright © 2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Vol 7(3): 363–381 [1470-4129(200812)7:3]10.1177/1470412908092343 Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on July 17, 2015 364 journal of visual culture 7(3) place, perhaps a mug shot, a gun. In restaging the scene, magazine artists could evoke emotions not elicited by the text. What fantasies are projected onto the images? And how do these images complement or undercut the text’s detachment? To visualize what cannot readily be shown, true crime mags developed their own iconography of spider webs, ropes, poison bottles, pointing fingers, twisted clothes hangers, sideways glances, clinging dresses, trenchcoats and fedora hats, dead-end streets, and neon. (Almost always noirish, the pics sometimes flash a tinge of B-movie sci-fi a la Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Blob.) Figures tend to be revealed from high angle (so we might pass judgment) or, more often, from below (to frighten us). At first glance, Cyanide and Sin comes off as a stylish coffee-table book, though this description limits the book’s scope and importance. Nevertheless let’s start with the book’s picture-book elements. The layout is stunning: dimensions at 9" by 12" are large, with reproductions matching the scale of the originals. Perhaps because the original pics were designed for projection and reproducibility, the images look as vibrant as if you owned the covers yourself. (Cyanide and Sin’s images are at least as visually dynamic as movie posters – and aren’t there a surfeit of books on these?) The book’s cover, with juxtaposed strips of cover-art thumbnails (resembling mug shots?), and a narrow, black slit, like a peephole, makes striking graphic sense. Paging through the book many times, I noted that each pass picked up a different aspect. First, simply the titles: ‘The Story of a She Wolf: How Could a Girl So Charming Be So Vicious?’; ‘It’s Happening in Oklahoma’; ‘Devildames and the Tattoo Orgy’; ‘Case of the Chloroform Kiss’; ‘When the Mrs. Plays Dirty: Death for the Shack-Up Wife’; ‘Honeymoon Death of the Strip-Tease Dancer’; ‘The Girls Thumbed Their Way to Eternity: Gay Life and Violent Death for an Heir to News Millions’. Next, facial expressions and body posture. Then typography (highly varied and very interesting). One can also focus on locations and see how they shift over time. Next, the text itself. And then the reader may begin to wonder about the crimes themselves, the lives of the women whose pictures were taken, the magazine’s audience, and so on. Straw’s opening essay contains a dense, compact, incisive analysis. He focuses on the magazines’ production history and style, along with political, cultural and aesthetic shifts, and auteurs; in doing so, he theorizes newly broken ground and raises important questions. The essay begins with an overview of the visual history of true crime magazines. Straw sketches a modulating historical landscape. There were multiple pressures on the magazines – technological, political, economic, and aesthetic. The rough contours first: in the 40s, true crime magazines witnessed an exponential sales growth in part because morality laws closed down pulpier genres. Filling in a niche for those in search of titillation, 40s covers tended to feature close-up or full-body pinups, colorfully retouched photos of women who almost always seem sexually predatory or impossibly vulnerable (Figures 1 and 2). The true crime magazines of the 50s shifted to grittier black-and- Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on July 17, 2015 Books white photographs, with bold typefaces bounded by other primary-colored blocks; these 50s magazines share the look of Life and more recent (and derivative) political artists like Barbara Kruger. (I find true crime magazines the most visually arresting – as if their content is what this style assimilates best.) In the 60s, the cover art reels back, degenerating into poor cousins of television shows like The Mod Squad and The Archies with bland full-color photos of men in bell bottoms and women in mini-skirts posed in lively but stilted postures. The hippy flower-power stuff looks awkward and cheesy. Was this the wrong context, mood and imagery for that time? Figure 1 Cover from Current Detective, January 1947. Figure 2 Cover from Inside Detective, May 1958. It’s Straw’s shadings of the finer details that become so thought-provoking. Often, he argues, aesthetic technique can drive content, setting up complex interactions among competing forces. Is the 40s covers’ emphasis on women’s portraiture a response not only to morality laws but also to the availability of higher quality ink and paper? Did the 1950s turn away from high-contrast black-and-white photography toward a narrower, evenly modulated gray scale support; a new focus on depictions of the rural poor? Did the shift to color photography in the 60s break true crime’s connection to genres like the documentary and newspaper still-photography? And is it partly because true crime covers became untethered from this formal style that the genre began its decline? Straw also provides astute observations about the ways cover art reflects social constructions of gender. Men are present on the covers of the 30s, disappear in the 40s, and come back in the 50s and 60s. The men give a sense of ‘punctual time’. (Straw cites a line attributed to Harry Cohn, President of Columbia Pictures: ‘A documentary is a picture without women. If there’s one woman in it, it’s a semi-documentary.’) Pressure flowed the other way too – from the socio-cultural and economic to the aesthetic. The magazines’ post war expressionistic, montage-based layouts may have mirrored a society still confronting itself, while the 50s cool, grid-and-block design may reflect a desire to keep populations separate. Most Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on July 17, 2015 365 366 journal of visual culture 7(3) perplexing is the imagery of race. True crime magazines acted like the civil rights movement hadn’t happened, or as if race didn’t exist. Straw’s 12,000-word essay rightly emphasizes visual design, historical change, and auteurship. True crime’s visuality might also bear upon reception studies, the body as a signifying system, and multimedia relations. Let me take a moment to consider how these might open up possibilities for scholars. Who perused true crime’s images? On one glossy cover, the underscored word ‘dad’ runs across a pinup’s forehead, cheek and forearm. There’s something melancholy about the handwriting as well as the address labels, faded and peeling from the front covers: Russel A. Romig, RI, Mcclure, PA. Were readers married men, teenage boys, daughters who found their fathers’ magazines? Were they different from the types who populated Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, like Joe and his buddy Herbie (do it with a pinch of arsenic, I.A.P. [Indian Arrow Poison] or a club)? In what ways did the readership cleave along lines of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, community, and class? (One scholar argues that true crime magazines may have been read mostly in working class, non-urban areas, an interesting theory considering that the magazine’s depictions shifted over time from urban glamour to underpopulated rural areas.) In a 1994 interview, Rose Mandelsberg, editor of Inside Detective, claimed that 54 percent of her readership were women. Yes, the text can occasionally sound like a Harlequin romance, but much of it rings so cold-blooded and misogynistic that an appeal to women is hard to imagine. Were male readers of true crime magazines – like Janice Radway’s women who read romance novels – drawing pleasures from carving out a space of one’s own, claiming one’s own time? Is the appeal of these magazines the same that fuels America’s Most Wanted, The National Inquirer, or online porn? How has the language of the body and the gaze changed? In contemporary advertising, models tend to look disdainfully at us, or turn away, self satisfied. Straw notes that the true crime models’ sightlines are historically specific – in the 40s, gazes were more direct, and in the 50s, gazes went askew, pointing diagonally off space. But while contemporary advertising asks little from us, what true crime images seem to share is that they demand a response. The staged depictions and retouchings of these women enhance their surprisingly composite expressions. They can appear knowing, enraged, and frightened; or desirous, dominant, and bored. Almost all seem to possess a depth of sexual knowledge, but they are also in need of help, suddenly off-kilter, frozen with overwhelming emotions. (Their bodies are torqued in surprisingly iconographic ways.) It’s cultural-studies corn, but one wants to ask whether these ambivalent depictions might contain a kernel of subversive potential? If these women were righted, might they not be Circes or Medusas, threatening to both genders? As mentioned, true crime’s enactments are most often staged, and the photos frequently retouched with paint. These transformations of lived experience create phantasma that may have influenced other media. What are true Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on July 17, 2015 Books crime’s influences upon cinema? How much do these images circulate with other media? Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, Robert Wise’s In Cold Blood, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, and Hitchcock’s slow disclosure of frightened women under the patriarchal gaze (Vertigo, Psycho, Notorious) may well have been shaped by true crime’s aesthetic. Do these images privilege some aspect of American culture that could not be expressed elsewhere? The few images of race are equally stylized and distorted. One cover clumsily intimates a vague Asian-ness (an arched eyebrow, a high-collared blouse, redlaquered cross-bars, bounded by the text ‘Narcotic ring!’). In one tiny photo of two African-Americans, coats and hats dwarf the hunched figures, making their ethnicity almost unreadable. Why portray violent crime as something perpetrated by white men on white women? As Straw points out, none of the violence perpetrated on African Americans (most of it white on black) is ever mentioned. Besides analyzing political, cultural and aesthetic forces, Straw makes claims for a pantheon of true-crime cover art auteurs. Straw most admires 50s cover photographer Burt Owen for his dramatic stagings of scenes in depth, with action unfolding in the foreground and background. Owen was able to show men and women ‘as equally anguished participants in rough-edged, unglamorous moments of frozen drama’, and his style only flourished in true crime magazines (p. 11). (He worked in many venues, including Woman’s Day and Sport, but though this photography was polished, it was undistinguished.) Perhaps true crime provides space for an auteur’s imagination as well as a viewer’s reception. Straw admires Owen’s ability to keep a range of emotions alive across the space of an image; I’m drawn to the way that each character seems out of joint, displaced. While Straw prefers the photo-documentary work of the 50s, I’m fascinated by the 40s because the staged, retouched images make possible many projections of femininity. What is the allure of femininity under distress, as projected by men, and why am I drawn to this? Despite true crime’s importance in American culture, there are very few extensive holdings of the most influential magazines either in public or university collections. Two informative books on crime literature, Anita Biressi’s Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories (2001) and Mark Seltzer’s True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity (2007) adopt a Foucauldian framework, but only discuss the novels. Several popular websites and numerous listings on eBay suggest people still care about these images; but besides Straw’s essay, no scholarship analyzes the visual dimension of true crime magazines. In visual literacy and popular culture classes, Cyanide and Sin might be paired with Roland Marchand’s Advertising and the American Dream (1985). (Both books provide a visual history of images from advertising.) It would also be useful for courses in film, gender studies, and graphic design. One might project the images for students and ask them what they see. Why do the women look the way they do in one era or another? What does this say about culture, sexuality, and desire? What do these images want to tell us? Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on July 17, 2015 367 368 journal of visual culture 7(3) Cyanide and Sin should attract many sorts of readers. I was surprised how much it taught me about power, desire, and aesthetics. The book’s depictions of race, class, gender, and sexuality enrich our understandings of 20th-century American society. It tells us something new about (commercial) artists and their audiences. And at the same time Cyanide and Sin presents a range of image/text relations that can provide good material for stylistic and formal analysis. It will allow us to study the interpenetration of film, photography, and painting, as well as the mix of technological, economic, and political influences on a significant part of American history. The book is itself, one can’t forget, an aesthetic experience – why not use it to cop a style or a flourish? References Biressi, Anita (2001) Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, Tom (2005) Hitchcock’s Crypotonomies: Vol. 1, Secret Agents. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marchand, Roland (1985) Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. Seltzer, Mark (2007) True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. London: Routledge. Carol Vernallis Arizona State University, Tempe, USA [carol.vernallis@asu.edu] Malcolm Miles, Cities and Cultures. Oxford: Routledge, 2007. 243 pp. ISBN 978 0415354431 The task that Malcolm Miles sets himself in Cities and Cultures, part of Routledge’s series of critical introductions to urbanism and the city, is not straightforward. As Miles indicates: ‘this has been a difficult book to write because it covers a large field in which the concepts culture and city are subject to continuing redefinition’ (p. 193). Whole treatises have been dedicated to examining the conceptual fields of cities and cultures, and the relationship between them, so attempting to introduce them within a single textbook is an ambitious undertaking. Miles astutely, however, does not tackle the subject matter head-on or look to boil down the manifest complexities. Instead, as he suggests, ‘the book plays on several ambivalences’ (p. 1). Miles accepts that there are a myriad different uses and assumptions surrounding the terms cities and cultures, dependent on a variety of geographical, historical and disciplinary contexts. Accordingly, in the first two chapters of the book, which introduce the two concepts in turn, Miles does not attempt to fix their meanings or provide ‘ultimate definitions’ (p. 2). Instead, he focuses on the mutability of the terms, and on the dualities of meaning produced by their singular and plural forms. This continues in subsequent chapters that range across the role of cities as nodes of cultural Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on July 17, 2015