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: #8083 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Independent
'The outstanding crime writer of his generation'

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

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.

Macabre Heart of Darkness
This is unforgettable literature. It both defines and transcends the genre. Hugely evocative of an age. Beautifully crafted characters. Stark horror. Dialogue like broken glass. The scene-setting boxing story and the dynamic between the three lead characters is incredibly poignant, and provides a more human dimension to the narrator than is usually on show in Ellroy's leading men. The red-meat-and-healthy-living also provided a counterpoint to the gothic gore. While the plot is by no means straightforward, it is satisyingly self-conatined, and rather less sprawling than the remainder of the LA quartet. Whereas horror and evil in those novels is embodied by Dudley Smith, in the Black Dahlia the horror seeps out of the body itself, corrupting all who come near her. This book sows the seed of the American Nightmare that is graphically illustrated in bloom in the remainder of the quartet through to the Cold Six Thousand. Ellis Loew is an excelllent villain, and Russ Millard a saint driven to distraction. Quite simply the best crime novel I have yet to read.

Black and Blue
In 'book noir' circles, the very stylish Ellroy is cult king - there surely is nobody quite like him. Hard to believe that he didn't actually live through the real-life experience of the infamous Black Dahlia murder of 1947 but Ellroy himself wasn't born until 1948. He dedicated this masterpiece to his mother, who was murdered in LA in 1958, her killer never being found. Perhaps this defining moment in the writer's life is the key to his obsession about those dark days of crime and corruption (on both sides of the law) in the twilight years of Hollywood's Golden Age.

As a background, Ellroy himself was a young man haunted by his mother's ghost; he became a thief, an alcoholic, a drug abuser and a sexual pervert who became notorious as a peeping Tom fixated on women's underwear. He broke into people's houses, he stole stuff, things like food and lingerie. He served time in jail. He declared himself to be a Nazi to get a rise out of people. Thankfully he eventually channelled his energies into writing, and what a gift he has given us.

This first of the author's famed 'LA Quartet' is based on the notorious murder of the young, beautiful and promiscuous Elizabeth Short, who has been found cut in half, disemboweled and bearing evidence that she had been tortured for several days before dying. Dubbed "The Black Dahlia" by the press, the victim becomes an obsession for two LAPD cops, narrator Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert and his partner, Lee Blanchard, both ex-boxers who also happen to be best friends and in love with the same woman. Despite a huge and highly publicised investigation, things go nowhere, and Bucky causes himself problems by sleeping with the casually bisexual Madeleine Sprague (daughter of a corrupt real-estate tycoon) who knew "the Dahlia" and slept with her once; he knows he has suppressed vital evidence in the case. With bent cops all around him Bucky fears for his life, but such is his all-consuming obsession with bringing the killer to justice that he eventually sets out on a personal vendetta and painstakingly recreates the last few days of Betty Short's life, eventually digging up new witnesses and evidence that the official investigation failed to discover.

This is a superb mixture of dark fact and even darker fiction, no doubt fuelled by Ellroy's life-long desire to find his own mother's killer and an outstanding example of ambition, insanity, passion and deceit, not to mention sexual obsession, set against the background of a booming, post-war Los Angeles.