Product Description

It is Los Angeles, 11th January 1947. A beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in shelf. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops are caught up in the investigation and embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26109 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
This is the opening book in Ellroy's bloodthirsty and pyrotechnic LA Quartet. A notorious Hollywood real-life murder, which paralleled in eerie ways the death of Ellroy's own mother, jump-starts a manic investigation encompassing crooked cops, perversions galore and a whole secret, murky history of Los Angeles. Not for the squeamish, but a roller-coaster ride of a book. (Kirkus UK)

Tim real-life unsolved "Black Dahlia" case (L.A., 1947), source material for several novels and films, get another go. round from hard boiler Ellroy (Blood on the Moon, Because the Night), in a long, earnest, overwrought novel that concentrates on the dark psychosexual hangups of two L.A.P.D. cops. The narrator is "Bucky" Bleichert, who, together with partner Lee Blanchard (his one-time pro-boxing rival), is assigned to work with Homicide when the mutilated body of trampy, pathetic, would-be actress Betty Short is found in a vacant L.A. lot. Blanchard is instantly obsessed with the Dahlia (as the papers soon dub Betty), because of guilt over his kid sister's bygone murder. Bucky becomes obsessed, too, especially once he starts sleeping with Dahlia lookalike Madeleine, a decadent rich girl who once had a lesbian fling with the Dahlia. Blanchard goes berserk, disappears, and later turns up dead in Mexico. Despite much triangular sturm, Bucky marries Blanchard's gift. And eventually, after the primary clues in the Dahlia case run dry (boyfriends, porno flicks), Bucky starts uncovering one nasty secret after another - corruption, perversion, coverups, family skeletons - until he finds the place where the Dahlia was tortured and butchered. . .and confronts the killer. Ellroy writes with undeniable energy, striving for down and-dirty textures and a raw emotional edge. But while some individual vignettes deliver the intended impact, the overall effect is unconvincing and shrill - with too many psychos per square chapter and too many lapses into stagily lurid narration. (". . .My voice came back in racking fits, 'I'll get him for you, he won't hurt you anymore, I'll make it up to you, oh Betty Jesus fuck I will.'") (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
It is Los Angeles, 11th January 1947. A beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in shelf. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops are caught up in the investigation and embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life.

About the Author
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the first two parts of his Underworld USA trilogy, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand which were both Sunday Times bestsellers.

Customer Reviews

4 1/2 stars
This is my kind of book. Tough cops, a brutal murder, great investigating and an inside look at the ugly underbelly of society. This is so much better than your typical crime fiction but still falls short of perfection and I don't really know why. Perhaps there are too many unbelievable twists towards the end or an over emphasis on unnecessary relationships throughout the book e.g Bucky and Kay. Still excellent and worthy of 4 1/2.

Dark Fragrances and Private Obesssions! Ellroy's Black Dahlia
Bought at the airport, and read in the blistering heat of a Carolina summer, this is the book to raise all your temperatures. For like Dickens, everyone in Ellroy lives according to their own private obsessions, and these obsessions corrode away at any glimpses of human contentment.

The Dahlia herself, as the nick name suggests spreads her dark fragrance throughout many destinies, becoming the very expression of all that they secretly desire. And desire governs every action in the book, a desire superbly rendered in the bloody poetry of Ellroy's prose. Even when I had stopped reading the novel, I could still hear it pulsing on: its dark vitality a revelation of love's cruelty and ironic submission; the terrible price paid for ambivalent intimacy!

And I cried at the end with the hero's final epiphany that the dead -in- life need our compassion as much as the dead.

'I reached for Betty then; a wish, almost a prayer. The clouds broke up and the plane descended, a big bright city at twilight below. I asked Betty to grant me safe passage in return for my love.'


Wonderful!

Nasty but compelling
James Ellroy's mother was murdered in Los Angeles when he was a young boy, a crime that has remained unsolved ever since. A far more notorious unsolved murder from that era inspired 'The Black Dahlia', that of Elizabath Short, a small-town beauty queen who came to Hollywood looking for fame, fortune and, above all, love. Her body was found horribly mutilated, bearing clear evidence of protracted torture. The case caused a sensation at the time and has inspired several non-fiction books, none of which convincingly identify a killer. Ellroy's novel is not so much an attempt to uncover the truth (his 'solution' to the crime is clearly an invention) as a portrait of post-war Los Angeles, and the seam of corruption and exploitation that ran through it. The strength of the book, as of other Ellroy titles, lies in his passion for the subject, fuelled (so he says in the autobiograhpical 'My Dark Places') by his lingering anger and bewilderment at his own mother's fate.
'The Black Dahlia' is shockingly nasty in places. Ellroy does not pull his punches in that respect. But this is anger that comes from somewhere, and the vision of LA that emerges is hypnotic and memorable.