?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
A TASTE FOR THE GRISLY (MURDER AND MAYHEM) Unique album entitled "Mysteries of Life," featuring Los Angeles Police Department crime photographs compiled by Lt. James Roy Harlacher. Silver prints, approximately 200 photographs on 89 pages, 3x2 to 9x7 inches (7.6x5 to 22.8x17.7 cm.), and the reverse, with typewritten captions. Folio, shellacked wood with the title and hand-painted decorative motif, ties; a few pages loose, many photographs detached, some are missing. 1917-1942
A grim tour of Los Angeles' dark side, compiled by James Roy Harlacher (1887-1964), an L.A. police lieutenant (pictured on the inside front cover).
The album begins with the case of James P. "Bluebeard" Watson, who murdered at least 9 of his 20 wives. Other sensational cases include the 1932 suicide of director Paul Bern (Jean Harlow's husband), and an apparently unknown crime-scene photograph from the 1947 "Black Dahlia" murder. Not surprisingly, many of the cases are racially charged.
Harlacher was able to obtain a few photographs from other locales. The earliest image in the book is of the 1915 Leo Franks lynching in Georgia. The volume ends in 1942 when he undergoes FBI training, and includes a mimeograph note of congratulations from J. Edgar Hoover.
