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Dime Mystery Meme #14: Watching her terrible fate
A number of Dime Mystery covers feature one or more women looking on as some other woman is put through some probably fatal ordeal, an ordeal which they to might soon expect to undergo. The cover of the April 1936 presents this as a simple case of crimen interruptum.
By January we have two beauties helplessly waiting their turn while a third puts up what again looks like ineffectual resistance to a fourth being put to the torch, itself a repeat Dime Mystery trope. The editors liked this idea so much that they commissioned the cover as an oil painting, executed in loving detail.
The cover.
And apparently the readership liked the theme so much that the editors again put it on the very next month’s cover.
We again see eyes directed heavenward.
The Eidolon Initiative: Chapter Six, Page One
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Dime Mystery Meme #13: A row of pretty corpses
Another macabre visual trope often employed at Dime Mystery Magazine involved a line or row of pretty women, presumably all dead or possibly in some sort of state of suspended animation. They might represent either failed experiments, or the villains of the stories want lots of dead women around. We have already seen one example of the trope on the February 1940 cover where, if you look past the foreground figures of the mad scientist and his pretty victim, you’ll see a stack of at least three other women, apparently frozen in blocks of ice. This trope will repeat, for example, on the March 1940 cover.
Evidently this “row of pretty corpses” was enough of a hit with Dime Mystery’s audience that the editors went with it the very next month for their April 1940 edition.
It’s a testament to how often themes repeat at Dime Mystery that I think could have put either of these covers without too much of a stretch into the categories of coffin stuffers as well.
The Eidolon Initiative: Chapter Six, Cover
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Dime Mystery Meme #12: Murder carefully labelled
Wartime lewdness shortages meant that Dime Mystery had to recycle even fairly questionable cover-art ideas. In the 1940s, there was something we might call “murder carefully labelled.” In November 1944 they ran this cover:
And a little more than a year later, in February 1946, this:
I am unsure of how to comment exactly, except that I am reminded of a line in the Blackadder the Third episode “Sense and Senility,” which I recall as “Every criminal, no matter how ingenious, makes one subtle yet telling mistake. Theirs was to have written down their entire conspiracy in play-manuscript form.”
What can I say? It’s not like we can have naked women writhing in transparent tube in every post.
The Eidolon Initiative: Chapter Five, Pin-up
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Dime Mystery Meme #11: Mummification
Another truly strange trope that came up frequently at Dime Mystery appears to be some sort of involuntary mummification, possibly in connection with forced mating with some long-dead Egyptian. A good example would be July 1936 (issue ISFDB entry here).
And there’s an even more thorough one for September 1940.
But perhaps my favorite of the trope is actually an inverse, a cover painting by Tom Lovell for the May 1937 issue (ISFDB entry here). It’s actually a man undergoing the wrapping, under the gaze of a laughing cultist. There’s a girl, and what’s she’s undergoing is rather more mysterious, with wisps of mist or mystic energy or whatever providing another example of just-barely-implied nudity.
This is another example of a page worth visiting at Pulp Covers where the curators provide some interesting interior art (described on the issue title page as having been done by “Monroe Eisenberg and Others”) and also make the whole issue available for download.
The Eidolon Initative: Chapter Five, Page Twenty-Seven
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Dime Mystery Meme #10: Snake transformations
Yes, you read that right. The suggestion that a pretty girl is facing imminent transformation into some sort of snake creature. It seems like a somehow overly-specific trope to which to which to devote two different covers over a little over four years, but there it is. Maybe ophidiophilia was in back in the 1940s. A comparatively chaste if suggestive cover from July 1944.
And of course, a considerably more batshit (but loveable) one from October 1940.
Hssss…