The research proposed here will study a corpus of several hundred sensational, crime-oriented periodicals published in four countries during the 1950s. During this decade, publishers in France, the United States, Quebec and Mexico produced a wide array of magazines and newspapers which exploited, for commercial purposes, public interest in crime. The periodicals to be studied here defined their focus explicitly as that of true crime. They offered treatments of criminal events which, however lurid and stylized, were to be distinguished from the crime fiction to be found in pulp magazine or mass market paperbacks. My key concern in this research is with the visuality of the true crime periodical, its role in gathering up and circulating a variety of visual forms with long histories, such as photojournalism, narrative illustration, graphic typography, cartography, and portraiture.