vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: Angie Dickinson in a 1974 image made for her television series Police Woman, which aired for four years, until 1978. She played an undercover LAPD sergeant in the Criminal Conspiracy Unit. Her character’s name was Suzanne Anderson, but everyone called her Pepper. Insert your own “spicy” quip at this point. They all fit when it comes to the lovely Dickinson.
Above: another shot from the Los Angeles Police Department Archives. There’s no info about what happened here, but if we had to speculate, because the knife has no blood on it, we bet the dead man tried to defend himself against an assailant and failed. We’re sharing the photo mainly because we think it has an interesting composition. It was made today in 1950.
This photo which was made by an LAPD crime scene photographer today in 1953 seems to show a murder victim, but the subject actually committed suicide. We guess that’s self-murder, but whatever, it’s an amazingly chaotic result. While it’s from the LAPD archvies, it was included in James Ellroy’s 2015 photo retrospective LAPD ’53. We have a copy and it’s worth a look for fans of the macabre. There isn’t much information on the photos—mostly they say merely “dead body” or “crime scene.” Ellroy instead discusses his own literary output, opines about film noir, shares anecdotes and musings about various Hollywood figures, recounts episodes from his youth, and occasionally lets himself be pulled down dark time warps he describes as “magical memory.” A typical example is his imaginary story of being at L.A.’s Club Alabam.
Charlie “Yardbird” Parker is bleating, blatting, honking and hiccuping “A Night in Tunisia.” Reefer smoke hangs humid. The music is decadently discordant. It’s the sock-it-to-me sonics of interminable chord changes off a recognizable main theme. It’s music for cultured cognoscenti that Bill Parker [LAPD Chief at the time] cannot acknowledge.
It takes brains and patience to groove the gist of this shit. It’s the musical equivalent of the chaos Bill Parker deplores. Five-year-old Ellroy is there, watching the Bird take flight. Everybody’s chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. The place is one big corroded iron lung. I’ve got a spike in my arm, I’m orbiting on Big “H,” I knew I’d write the text for this book one day, so I’ve got my voyeur’s cap on.
Interesting, no? Ellroy’s writing these days resides permanently on a razor’s edge, as he ties together crime, politics, and alpha male ultraviolence. He seem to us the perfect transgressive guide for LAPD ’53‘s tour through disaster and death for two reasons. First, he isn’t just an observer—he was a one-man terror show in his own right, engaging in petty crime through his youth, joining the American Nazi Party in high school, and generally leaving chaos in his wake. He waves this period away as a cry for attention. His fame and teflon persona have facilitated this dismissal, and that’s the second reason he’s a good choice for the book: other people pay dearly for indiscretions far less severe, like the universe has played a terrible joke on them. Ellroy’s fiction has always explored such cosmic inexplicability. He makes LAPD ’53 an experience.
The above photos show Barbara Burns when she was busted for drugs today in 1958 after LAPD officers found track marks on her arms. Burns was the well-to-do daughter of famed comedian Bob Burns, but her father had died of kidney cancer in 1956. Barbara Burns was sentenced to probation after the arrest, and the story got some play in national newspapers, with several calling her probation sentence a storybook opportunity at a second chance. But she didn’t cooperate in the role. She managed to cobble together some behind-the-cameras television work, but was arrested for heroin possession in 1959. That time she served ninety days in jail and admitted in an interview, “I’m really hooked. I had nothing else to do, and my mother wouldn’t talk to me. I wanted to be a singer but I was too heavy and they told me it would help me lose weight.”
earned ninety days in Camarillo State Hospital. In November 1960 she was snared in another weed bust, but that time she walked after a jury acquitted her. When she was arrested for heroin possession again in June 1961, she lamented what had probably been true for longer than she admitted—that she had doomed her chance to have a career in show business.
This photo, which is another one from the Los Angeles Police Department photo archive, shows an unidentified man after police crime scene detectives have outlined his body in chalk. Note the knife. He defended himself against an attacker, but unsuccessfully. Or perhaps he attacked someone and they defended themself successfully. The photos from the archive carry only the information written on them, and in this case that’s nothing. But it’s a compelling shot, made today in 1950.
The only information accompanying the above image, which is from the Los Angeles Police Department photo archive, is that an unidentified bystander was shot to death during a botched jewelry store robbery. That was today in 1932. The photo came to public notice when it was exhibited back in 2019 by L.A.’s Lucie Foundation, along with more than 80 other images.
This macabre image, which showed up online a while back thanks to an exhibit of one hundred years of Los Angeles Police Department photos, shows an LAPD detective regarding a muder victim whose throat was cut while he was in his automobile. There’s no information about who the victim was or why it happened, but it’s an arresting image of a grisly end. The shot was made by Leon Driver, who when he arrived in L.A. from Texas in the early twenties was arrested for vagarancy, but by 1925 was one of the earliest official photographers employed the LAPD. He made this photo today in 1929.
Just in case the holiday season was putting you in too upbeat of a mood, above is a dead guy for you. Nice of us, right? As the notation at the lower right of the photo indicates, this poor fella was found today in 1926, and documented by a police photographer named Stewart. This was in Los Angeles, at 503 North Plymouth, which is right in the heart of town not far from the Wilshire Country Club and Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery (now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where movies are shown on summer weekend nights, projected onto the side of a mausoleum). The body has a gun in its hand, but loosely. We thought we’d find a police report indicating whether this was suicide or a staged murder, but sadly this person vanished nameless into the snowdrifts of history.
In Montreal, Canada, at the École Polytechnique, a gunman shoots twenty-eight young women with a semi-automatic rifle, killing fourteen. The gunman claimed to be fighting feminism, which he believed had ruined his life. After the killings he turns the gun on himself and commits suicide.
Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to overturn the 18th Amendment which had made the sale of alcohol illegal. But the criminal gangs that had gained power during Prohibition are now firmly established, and maintain an influence that continues unabated for decades.
During an overwater navigation training flight from Fort Lauderdale, five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo-bombers lose radio contact with their base and vanish. The disappearance takes place in what is popularly known as the Bermuda Triangle.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sails to Europe for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, France, becoming the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office.
In the U.S., a manslaughter trial against actor/director Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle ends with the jury deadlocked as to whether he had killed aspiring actress Virginia Rappe during rape and sodomy. Arbuckle was finally cleared of all wrongdoing after two more trials, but the scandal ruined his career and personal life.
In California, Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on university property.
Unemployment figures are released revealing that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 3.3 percent, the lowest rate for almost fifteen years. Going forward all the way to the current day, the figure never reaches this low level again.
