CrimeBeat Feeds America’s Big Appetite for News on Crooks

Has it really come to this? Is our national obsession with celebrities giving way to an even more twisted fixation? T.E.D. Klein, editor of a new magazine titled CrimeBeat, is counting on it.

The premiere issue arrives on newsstands Tuesday, and Klein figures plenty of readers will fork over $2.50 to spend precious time reading about murders, rapes, muggings and burglaries.

In his editor’s note, Klein asks and answers the obvious question: “Why is there such a fascination with crime?”

“It’s a fascination with the mysteries of human behavior,” he writes, “with the extremes of human good and human evil, sometimes within the same soul.”

The first to sample the new product, he thinks, will come from the pool of millions who watch “true-crime” television, read crime books and riffle through newspapers in search of the latest real-life villainies.

CrimeBeat’s circulation staff is also hustling the magazine directly to cops, through a variety of police organizations. But, Klein believes, there is an even larger potential market: crime victims.

“Crime--the threat of crime, the human cost, the corrosive fear that crime inspires--looms larger in America today than ever before,” he writes. “So think of CrimeBeat as a sort of illustrated case-by-case survival guide for the ‘90s. We wish you didn’t need it, but chances are you do.”

This perceived readership is reflected in the advertising: pitches for car and home alarm systems, The Club, an anti-car theft device, Fox TV’s “America’s Most Wanted,” private investigator schools. And, for the ubiquitous Franklin Mint’s collection of “12 Official Badges of the Great Western Lawmen.”

This Rolling Stone-sized publication is slicker than the schlocky true-detective pulp ‘zines that still lurk in dusty barbershops. Many contributors are respected newspaper crime reporters and free-lancers, and the best stories are gems of the surprisingly varied true-crime genre.

The most interesting piece is “Courthouse Blues.” An excerpt from David Simon’s book, “Homicide,” it explores the jury system as it works--or, rather, fails to work--in Baltimore courts.

The culprit Simon fingers for what he sees as increasingly lousy jurors is a familiar scapegoat. “Television,” he writes, “ensures that criminal juries are impaneled with ridiculous expectations.”

Other articles explore the fusion of reality and fantasy that has always been a part of the public’s thrall with crime. In “ ‘L.A. Law’ on Trial,” for example, real L.A. lawyers critique that show. There are also how-to articles on crime prevention and lists of “the FBI’s Most Wanted” and America’s “10 Meanest Streets.” One feature, a catalogue of the last meals eaten by Death Row inmates before execution, is particularly, well, tasteless. But overall, the magazine skirts more morbid possibilities. It walks a fine line, never quite pandering to paranoid wackos who get some sort of sick gratification by imagining the mayhem around them.

Pieces that reveal opinions, reveal similar ones. A moving story by a rape victim is predictably titled “Raped by the System.” Another article, “They Want Their MTV,” is subtitled “how convicts are coddled.” And “A Cop’s Wish List” laments legal technicalities, officers’ inferior firepower and the “bleeding hearts” who don’t understand the difficulties of police work.

“I wish everyone would stop judging all cops by a few minutes of home video made in L.A.,” writes the author, a 21-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department. “If we have a bias at all in the magazine,” says Klein, “it’s that we are very much pro-victim.” The magazine would be stronger, though, if “victimization” was not so sanctified, and if solutions that probed deeper into the social fabric were not ignored in favor of hard-boiled formula.

Note: About the time this reporter was writing the fourth paragraph of this column, in his home office, five Los Angeles Police Department squad cars arrived across the street. The officers arrested two suspects at gunpoint for attempting to burglarize the home while the owner and her son were inside. For the record, the officers were the epitome of courteous professionalism.

CrimeBeat, charter subscriptions, $17.95 a year; (800) 435-0715.

REQUIRED READING

In 1950, the Boston Celtics hired the first black player in the NBA. The Celtics fielded the first all- black team, and hired the first black coach. Yet a black Celtics executive can still say, “There is an air of hostility here that doesn’t exist in any other city.”

The Aug. 19 Sports Illustrated explores Boston’s persistent racist image. “Beantown: One Tough Place to Play,” the last in a series of articles examining the life of blacks in sports, offers no answers but plenty of insight.

SHREDDER FODDER

And here is a glimpse at the first-ever magazine excerpt from Alexandra Ripley’s highly hyped sequel to “Gone With the Wind”:

“ ‘I want you ,’ Scarlett said with stark honesty.

“Rhett was silent. In the dim cabin of the sloop she could see only his outline and the pale smoke from his cigar. She wanted him so much that she felt physical pain. But she sat tall, waiting for him to speak.”

The lengthy excerpt appears not in Seventeen or Soap Opera Digest but in the September Life.