The Black Dahlia [Paperback]

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. Read more ›

Once you get the hang of the Ellroy idiom it's quite addictive and you even start talking like that yourself a bit. Which is embarrassing.

As with all Ellroy novels I've read, in Black Dahlia the streets are mean, the characters morally bankrupt, and the plot so byzantine as to implicate every one from the chief of police to some Mexican pornographers. This is very much Ellroy's world view: fundamentally we are all ugly, and the worst of us are the ones who pretend we're not. It's very Thomas Hobbes, actually.

The plot scenario is very similar to L.A. Confidential - two cops with a strange interpersonal relationship and a common squeeze on the hunt for the perpetrator of a dastardly crime. But while the crime is much more brutal, the book itself is not so dark. Sure it isn't Ogden Nash, but it (and especially the Ellroy Lingo) frequently had me sniggering as I read. Maybe I'm just desensitised to Ellroy's morbid style....

I think the danger with Ellroy is to read too much into it; the patios is so convincing it is easy to mistake this for something deeper than it is: like Quentin Tarantino, Ellroy is the first to admit his art really is pulp fiction, despite what the critical luvvies say.

But look, bottom line, it's a cracking read, and that's all you really need to know. Read more ›