Above: a cover of Australia’s constantly amazing Adam magazine published this month in 1963. The art illustrates Dennis Chinner’s tale, “Diving Doll, about an aquatic salvage worker who’s in love with his business partner’s wife, gets into an affair with her, and ponders the ease with which the inconvenient hubby could be murdered during a dive, but under the guise of an accident. In the end he decides not to do it. He’s no monster. Then the very accident he’d contemplated occurs, everyone assumes he’s a murderer—but one against whom there’s not enough proof to arrest and prosecute—and he finds that in the community’s eyes he’s become the very monster he’d feared being. Worse, the woman he loves thinks he’s a murderer too. Interestingly, of all the twists we’ve read in vintage crime fiction, we hadn’t run across this precise one before of a man forced to accept his terrible new status. It’s just another unsolvable dilemma in mid-century men’s magazine fiction. Twenty-one scans below.
