From Hewers of Wood to Producers of Pulp: True Crime in Canadian Pulp Magazines of the 1940s

Abstract

In the 1940s, federal restrictions on the importation of U.S. publications spurred the growth of a Canadian pulp magazine industry, one branch of which was true crime. These cheap consumables, adorned with bawdy and violent cover imagery as well as sexually explicit advertisements, sometimes featured Canadian murder cases. True crime stories featured edgy dialogue and gumshoe argot but they remained within, and helped to define, the boundaries of heterosexuality, the racist moral hierarchies, and the certitude of explicable crime. Far from presenting authority figures in a dim light, Canadian true crime tales were written from the perspective of law men, the local police officers and the Mounties who doggedly gathered evidence and trailed unrepentant criminals. Writers took readers on journeys to morally dark places, particularly the remote north and the far west, where civilization along settled Euro-Canadian models had barely taken hold well into the twentieth century. Terrible murders, committed by ruthless criminals (typically Native men), threatened to rock the foundations of Canadian civilization but true crime reassured readers that the cops, the courts, and the gallows could and would always set it right. The industry declined by the 1950s, not on account of a moral-clean-up campaign but as a result of the pulp novel industry’s growth and the revocation of wartime importation bans.