The Black Dahlia [Import] [Hardcover]

James Ellroy (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 325 pages
• Publisher: Mysterious Press (October 1988)
• ISBN-10: 071261995X
• ISBN-13: 978-0712619950
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (178 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

152 of 159 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply the Best, December 14, 2001

By 

Bob Carpenter (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Black Dahlia (Paperback)

James Ellroy's "The Black Dahlia" is almost too dark, too gripping and too believable. It stands out among a crowd of mysteries (sub-genre police procedural) as simply a great novel. Most mysteries I put down and forget that I've read them. The characters from Ellroy's noir vision of L.A. in the late 1940s and early 1950s are indelibly etched in my mind, as is Ellroy's characterization of the period and location itself. This is the most visceral book I've ever read.

I picked up this book myself from Partners and Crime's Top 100 shelf (P&C is an awesome mystery bookstore in Manhattan's Greenwich Village). I loaned my copy to a friend, who gave it back to me a week later and said he didn't want to read the rest of the series or any other mystery novel again in his life -- this one was perfect and anything else would just ruin his ability to savor "The Black Dahlia". I loaned it to a second friend who finished it in a week, and then went out and bought the complete Ellroy ouevre. This is not a one-night read unless you have strong eyes, strong coffee, heroic concentration and an iron will.

If you get a chance, hear Ellroy read from these books in person.

Sequencing Ellroy's books is tough, because they're all similar in terms of time frame, setting, and characters. The L.A. trilogy plus one is:

* 1947: The Black Dahlia
* 1950: The Big Nowhere
* 1951: L. A. Confidential
* 1958: White Jazz

Dudley Smith also appears in Ellroy's second novel, "Clandestine", set in 1951.

50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ellroy's First Masterpiece, August 31, 2000

By 

Stephen McLeod (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Black Dahlia (Paperback)

This first novel in the much-praised "L.A. Quartet" is one of the great American works of art. Up there with Twain, Fitzgerald, Chandler, Hammett and Hemingway. "Dark" is too bright a word for Ellroy's fiction. Another reviewer called Ellroy "the Caravaggio of modern fiction." That says it all.

In the "Dahlia", a real woman named Betty Short, whose butchered corpse appeared in a vacant lot one morning in real-life L.A. circa 1947, Ellroy found his essential enigma and his battering muse. This famous, unsolved murder victim becomes in the novel, a terrifying emblem for his own oedipal quest, a quest that he fearlessly explored in his memoir *My Dark Places*. It is a work of genius, and we are all the richer for it. Its scope is epic. Its tone is sharpened ebony. Nothing in Ellroy's previous novels prepares you for this. It is also a book that repays multiple readings. It's only outdone by each subsequent novel. Full-blown addiction is the only way I can describe my response to Ellroy's fiction. It will jazz you and haunt you and inhabit your dreams.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In Memory of Elizabeth Short, June 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Dahlia (Paperback)

Back in the mid-1980's, The Black Dahlia was the first James Ellroy novel that I had ever read. I have since become a huge fan, reading everything he has written, including a personal account of his own mother's murder, My Dark Places. My admiration for Mr. Ellroy as an author is unparalleled. Nowhere is his genius for capturing the noir era/LAPD corruption/tarnished Tinseltown of Los Angeles more evident than in The Black Dahlia. This densely plotted tale expertly exposes the gritty, seamy side of post-war Los Angeles. He also writes it like an homage to its victim, Elizabeth Short, whose murderer is unknown to this day. She was the classic Hollywood victim. To his credit, Mr. Ellroy does not shy away from exposing the brutal hypocrisy of Hollywood in the 1940's and 1950's. Mr. Ellroy's books are not for the squeamish; his blunt, staccato-like dialogue can be somewhat off-putting. Anyone, however, interested in a writer who delivers a story packed with interesting characters and an intricate plot, The Black Dahlia - along with Mr. Ellroy's other novels - is the choice for you.