This is an independent column and may not necessarily agree with CRIMSON editorial policy.

Crimes of passion are lots of fun. Sometimes they do not even have to have ladies, lovely or otherwise, in them, to have a certain element of esoteric fascination for the casual breakfast reader. Sometimes they don't even have to be crimes of passion. If it's just a nice clean, complete job, like a compulsory quadruple crossing of the Styx, it's enough to ensure most of the front page of the Hub City's news vending organizations. In fact we strongly suspect that the men in charge of make-up on the local journals aren't sufficiently shocked when one of their fellow leaves his earthly vessel. We think they sit around waiting for some one to go in a particularly violent, or novel manner and then start to work.

Passion and the Press

Pictures, of course, are the sine-qua non, of nice, attractive make-ups. When the victim happens to be an artist's model, and a photographer's artist model at that, everybody has just oodies of fun and he result often finds Mr. Justice Roberts staring unashamed into the coy, but deeply soulful eyes a trifle distorted by the wirephoto process, of a girl, whose spirit is forever fresh (copyright, 1937, by "Inside Detective" and "Front Page Detective Magazines".)

When the Supreme Court is inconsiderate enough to hand down some pretty important decisions on the same day as an unusually "sex-mad" crime occurs, the first page is somewhat crowded. Page three does pretty well, though, aside from one extremely small, nondescript single column cut labelled "Model in Street Clothes".

If there is one of those nebulous personalities known as a "Local Girl", as even "Local Man" involved in some slight way with the case, so much the better. Pictures of hem, with sad, proud smiles, hurrying down their stairs, into autos, on trains, etc., are rushed through engraving plants onto your breakfast table. Soon negro house boy suspects, stern but kindly judges, and lawyers will parade by. It's almost a relief to turn back a few more pages until we come to a placid, bovine girl, but one whom we know is good to her parents, labelled "Hard Working Member of Dance Committee."