Crime Does Not Pay: Issues 26 and 27

Crime Does Not Pay was the first true crime comic book series. It took over the canceled Silver Streak series. It featured stories on real life criminals like Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Etc. At its height in popularity it sold six million copies. It was the only nonhumor book to give the superhero comic books some major competition. It was the first book to show that young men, and not just little boys, read comic books.Crime Does Not pay was also the first comic book to have a horror host. The ghoulish ghost of Mr. Crime who was introduced in issue #24. He pre-dated the host of the EC horror comic books that would come later. Other companies started publishing crime comic books and by 1949 there were 30 of them for sale on the stands. In the 1950's the book Seduction of the Innocent and an investigation by the Senate had many publishers clean up their horror and crime comics. But readers didn't like the sanitized versions and many of them were cancelled by the end of the Fifties. Crime Does Not Pay ended with Issue #147 in 1955.This book reprints issues #'s 26 and 27. To be honest issue #27 that we had to work with was cut off at the bottom. The reason why is because a previous owner wrote on the bottom of every page. The parts cut off didn't hurt the stories. Other then that the books are reprinted even with the ads and text pages.