Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5347 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Independent
'The outstanding crime writer of his generation'

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:
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.

Well written thriller...
A pretty good thriller from James Ellroy (LA Confidential), about two cops investigating a young woman's murder.

The story is hung on the true story of Elizabeth Short, who was discovered murdered on a vacant lot in LA in 1947. It achieved notoriety by the rather gruesome way she was left; cut in half and arms and legs splayed - she had also received a lot of nasty injuries which I won't go into.

The book rather uses this as a backdrop (I don't know how much truth about the case is in it) for the story of Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, two boxers and now LA cops who team up on the case. They both seem to become rather obssessed with the Dahlia herself, and their relationships with eachother and their women are explored with this in mind. The whodunnit element builds up nicely and some good twists mean that there is a satisfying denouement, with, as often with Ellroy, a continuing sense of some gloom for the surviving protagonists.

A monumental crime novel
The characters are alive, human, driven and complex. The story? Sordid, brutal, thrilling. How Elroy comes up with this stuff amazes me. Stop reading reviews and read the real thing.