Dime Mystery Magazine
American weird menace pulp magazine
Dime Mystery Magazine was an American pulp magazine published from 1932 to 1950 by Popular Publications. Titled Dime Mystery Book Magazine during its first nine months, it contained ordinary mystery stories, including a full-length novel in each issue, but it was competing with Detective Novels Magazine and Detective Classics, two established magazines from a rival publisher, and failed to sell well. With the October 1933 issue the editorial policy changed, and it began publishing horror stories. Under the new policy, each story's protagonist had to struggle against something that appeared to be supernatural, but would eventually be revealed to have an everyday explanation. The new genre became known as "weird menace" fiction; the publisher, Harry Steeger, was inspired to create the new policy by the gory dramatizations he had seen at the Grand Guignol theater in Paris. Stories based on supernatural events were rare in Dime Mystery, but did occasionally appear.
Popular Publications soon started more magazines in the same genre, and weird menace magazines began to appear from other publishers as well. In 1937 the emphasis on sex and sadism in Dime Mystery's stories increased, but in 1938 the editorial policy switched back to detective stories. These stories now focused on detectives with some unusual handicap such as amnesia or hemophilia. There was a brief return to weird menace stories, after which more ordinary detective stories filled the magazine until it ceased publication in 1950.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q110413420. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 1950, 1933 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dime Mystery Magazine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.