Dime Mystery Magazine, Volume 23, Issue 4, August 1940

by Editors of Dime Mystery Magazine (Editor)

Contents:
• "Peace Over Minnesota," essay by The Editor
• "The Case of the Faceless Dead," novella by Edward S. Williams
• "Flowers Grow on Corpses," novelette by R.S. Lerch
• "Satan’s Fingertips," short story by Don James
• "The Light That Killed," novelette by Russell Gray
• "Beast of the Fortneys," novelette by William R. Cox
• "The River Styx," uncredited essay

Cover art by David Berger.

112 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 1940

About the author

Dime Mystery Magazine was launched in December 1932 by Harry Steeger, who was also a co-founder of Popular Publications. It was originally called Dime Mystery Book Magazine, and changed its name and format in October 1933.

Its first editor was Rogers Terrill, who came to the magazine with experience editing pulps Fiction House and as Editor-in-Chief at Popular Publications. Terrill remained editor until 1941, and the list of editors who succeeded him has been speculated on but is known.

The magazine's original format was one mystery novel and two to three short stories. The covers featured the cover image of the featured novel. The long novel form was not popular, however, and after a few issues, the magazine was losing money.

The magazine relaunched with a new title and format. Beginning with the October 1933 issue, the magazine, now called Dime Mystery Magazine, now featured a half-sized mystery novella, two to three novelettes, and several short stories.

The magazine also became the first to represent a new genre: "weird menace" or "shudder" pulps. Inspired by French Grand Guignol theatre, the weird menace genre combined mystery and terror, but always featured a rational explanation for the apparently supernatural events that occur in the story. The stories often featured villains who were physically deformed or psychopathic, and driven to sadistic acts by greed or lust. The murders were horrible and inhuman, and often included torture and sexualized violence. The murders involving human vivisection were considered the most dreadful.

Dime Mystery's covers were notoriously sensational, and routinely depicted ghoulish villains sadistically torturing scantily-clad maidens. Steeger later noted that he "devoted more time and attention to covers than to anything else because I figured they were our salesmen."

Dime Mystery's sales and influence peaked in 1937. By 1939, the magazine had dialed back both the sex and violence, returning to detective-driven fiction. The new trend was "defective detective" stories that featured a hero who overcame a deformity or a disease to protect society against ghastly villains and to guard "normal" people from abominable terrors.

In the 1940s, the popularity of pulp fiction was waning, and Dime Mystery began publishing only every other month. Its content became even less lurid, and its detective stories became more conventional. During World War II, paper shortages forced the magazine to raise its price to fifteen cents, though it did not change its title. In 1948, the price rose to twenty cents, and the magazine folded altogether in 1949.