By July 1934, around 100,000 copies of pulp crime magazines had been imported into NSW alone. But Australia’s Customs Department did not see the magazines as a vicarious thrill or crime-fighting tool; they were viewed as a dangerous mix of violence and horror. True Detective and many of its contemporaries purporting to tell ‘authentic stories of crime detection’ were declared prohibited imports in the 1930s.

Pulp magazines like True Detective were prohibited under obscenity laws, despite rarely portraying sexual material. The crimes presented often had lascivious undertones, but censors took greater issue with the considerable emphasis on violence.  In a Cabinet Minute in 1959, the head of Customs pointed out, ‘The publishers [of True Detective] go to some length to re-enact the ghastly and gruesome details associated with murder cases’. Actors and actresses with hammed-up expressions of lechery and fear posed for re-enactments of crimes that played up scandalous details.