The Black Dahlia is a roman noir on an epic scale: a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America’s most infamous unsolved murder mystery–the murder of the beautiful young woman known as The Black Dahlia.
The Black Dahlia
By jamesellroy
Enjoyed the book even though I found it disturbing. Not so much the graphic details of the murder of poor Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia), more so the psychological characteristics of the characters including the main character Bucky Bleichert, the LAPD cop. It wasn’t until I finished the book, I realized this novel uses a lot of true facts from the real Black Dahlia killing in 1947 Los Angeles. Then on learning something about the author, things started to drop in place as to why I found this book disturbing.
Short was a young woman murdered in 1947, her body cut in half and discarded in Los Angeles, in a notorious and unsolved crime. According to one source, throughout the author’s youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires based on his own mother’s rape and murder when Ellroy was 10 years old. His confusion and trauma led to a period of intense clinical depression, from which he recovered only gradually.
These personal issues are clear to see in this novel. Bleichert (surely the author?), his cop partner and buddy Lee Blanchard, and Kay Lake are the main characters at the centre of the novel. Initially, there is a kind of chaste and weird ménage a trois going on between them. Like most of the other characters they are dark and complex individuals weaving between righteousness, killing, corruption, and promiscuity – one moment trying to do good, the next … and that’s just the “good guys.” This book is full of dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic—albeit moral—worldview. I found it fascinating and hard to put down.
You can expect dialogue and narration replete with jazz slang, cop patois, creative profanity and drug vernacular with a particular use of period-appropriate slang. This is a tale set in 1947 and the immediate years after so don’t be surprised to read words and attitudes expressed that are wholly unacceptable in 2020.
It’s one of the few books I have read where I am forced to look up words and their meaning (Merriam, of course, as it’s American English). I now know the meaning of amscray, ixnay, and copacetic. The first two are derived from ‘Pig Latin’ – what I knew in Britain as back slang, whereby a made-up word is formed by transferring the initial consonant or consonant cluster of each word to the end of the word and adding a vocalic syllable and can be used in a conversation to convey secrecy. You can also expect stripped-down staccato sentence structures like some of the great noir and pulp fiction writers.
Recommended.
Dark, macabre, and daring, The Black Dahlia is a must-read for any fan of noir crime. The characters tug you into the storyline, and the vivid descriptions of the crimes, as well as the relentless pursuit of a killer, keep you coming back.
I love James Ellroy. Everything he writes. He does Noir L.A. like nobody else. He writes as if you were walking with him down a steamy, rainy night. He takes this tragic unsolved true murder and brings it to life as brutally and as tragically as the rape and murder of his own mother.
The brutal murder of ES, aka the Black Dahlia has gripped the minds of the world since her body was found but never her killer. I read a lot of books on the subject, and in their own way, all of them are good. It’s one cold case that I think will remain unsolved but it’s always interesting to read a new take on it.
This is a gritty noir novel of LA based on the famous Black Dahlia murder. Fun read, and i also enjoyed the movie.
After the first chapter, which is a bit slow, this becomes one gut punch after another. Brutal and compelling.
Ellroy truly captures the time in which the Black Dahlia murder took place. Well crafted to the point where unease takes hold, the book outshines the film by a million miles.
Neo-noir: dames, fists, pistols. What more do you need?
This a NOVEL, not non-fiction, which somehow I missed. I was expecting The Suspicions of Mr. Wicher or something. (Good book, btw.) So it’s the tale of two cops working to “solve” a case that was never actually solved. I thought that would be a problem, too, but that was pulled off just fine.
By the time I decided what was actually going in instead of what I expected, it all finally took off. The beginnig IS slow and has nothing to do with the murder, but the events described all turn out to have been necessary for the plot. I’d just roll with it. This isn’t a perfect book, it’s really a 4.5, but I rounded up. Nothing is written badly or weakly; the book just doesn’t hit Dashill Hammett or the other greats of the actual era. Expect a good neo-noir following traditional tropes (including a last-moment twist) rather than new story ground covered. It’s Chinatown. That’s about all you need to know.
Recommended for noir and neo-noir fans and fans of historical fiction who can stand a greusome murder or two.