Customer Reviews

The Black Dahlia

5 star:		(89)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Black Dahlia is a crime thriller based upon a famous case in the 1940's. A Hollywood starlet named Elizabeth Short was found dead and hideously mutilated in a vacant lot. This case was never solved but has fascinated criminal investigators and the public ever since.

Ellroy's novel is told from the viewpoint of an ex-boxer, Bucky Bleichert, who joins the police force and ends up investigating the Black Dahlia murder. Bucky becomes fascinated with the murder victim, as well as with femme fatale Madeline, the nymphomania heir of a corrupt real-estate dynasty. Bucky's partner is a rogue cop hyped on Benzedrine who seems to have more money than he should on a cop salary. Bucky falls for his partner's girl and socializes with them in an intimate triangle.

Ellroy's writing is flamboyant and edgy, using gritty cop lingo to describe the seamy underbelly of Hollywood. The story manages to reveal the twisted psychology of a cop on the edge, and the moral ambiguity of using violence to protect the peace. Bucky's emotional state is touchingly portrayed; a deep sadness and depression at his balancing act between sadism and masochism that plays out in every area of his life. Ellroy portrays the 1940's with clarity and wit, with all its beauty, glamour and pre-civil rights brutality. Highly recommended!

There I was you see, I walked into the book store, the whole place smelled like old moldy books. So I see this old broad behind the counter. Had a couple of miles on her, sort of like me. So I ask her, trying not to sound too stupid, "Do you have any Elway books?" She looked at me, smiled and said "who?". Elway, you know, wrote L.A.Confidential". She said "Oh, you mean Ellroy". She then walks over to the used paper back mystery section and said, "All I have by Ellroy is "The Black Dahlia". It's based on a murder that happened in L.A. a few years ago". So I picked my brain, thinking, " yeah I read something about this Ellroy guy in the newspaper a couple of years ago". So I buy the book, looks like it is on its last legs, pages are almost yellow and ready to fall out. I take the thing home, read the back cover, get an idea of the story and start to read it. Then after reading a few pages, I'm hooked. I'm turning page after page, my eyes feel like two hot burning coals. I'm sweating, my brain feels like it's been scooped out, slammed against the wall and it's oozing down like cauliflower mixed with vanilla yogurt. I feel like laying two raw pieces of pork chops alongside my head so I can cool off. I read this book in two days. My whole life came to a stop. Never did have a clue on how it would end; yeah there were little clues here and there, but my little pea-picking brain never picked them up. Now I says to myself, "this Ellroy guy can really write". Now I'm afraid to read any more of his books. I don't want my life to come to a stop again. I'm an old retired copper, read my share of mysterys in my day, but I've got stuff to do around the house, I can't just read all day. So be aware ! Be prepared when you read this book. It's gritty, it's tough, it makes most mystery thrillers read like Peter Pan. I'll keep this book forever...Very intense, not for the light hearted! Make sure that you are ready for this. It ain't like picking daisies or taking a walk in the park with fido. This is a knock down, drag out, real life thriller that will knock your socks off. Maybe someday in the middle of winter when it's raining baby elephants and I can't do anything else, I'll even think about reading another Ellroy book.I don't think that my heart can take it......

The story takes place in L.A. starting in 1947 about an Ex boxer turned cop Dwight (Bucky) Bleichert and his involvement in a famous cased dubbed "The Black Dahlia" by the media. A body of a girl is found that was brutally tortured and Bucky and his partner Lee along with many others are assigned to work on the case. The story follows Bucky's life as he works and is consumed by the case.
I say it follows his life and not just the case because the story is as much about the way the case affects the people involved in it as it is about the case it self.

The good: I really liked the characters. They came across as realistic because many of them have a lot of grey area in them. There were no white knights that always do everything "the right way" all of the characters were flawed and imperfect in a way and would do things that weren't right but were necessary. This made them believable because no one always does the right thing. It showed a possible (and sometimes necessary) dark side to the police department and their ability to manipulate public opinion.

The Bad: No too much really. There are a lot of characters to keep up with. Sometimes I had to figure out the slang terms of the time. Phrases or terms used in a way I wasn't familiar with. This was good too though because it made the time period seem more real.

Overall a good read that I would recommend. I am going to follow this with the next book by Ellroy.

Having read and loved 'American tabloid' and 'LA Confidential' (the movie version was absolutely robbed at the Oscars - it was a far superior piece of film making than 'Titanic') I bought 'The Black Dahlia'.

It has that familiar staccato, hit-em-between-the -eyes Ellroy style, but I found it had a little more going for it than 'LA Confidential' (don't get me wrong - I thought that book was fantastic). I think this is because it's a little easier to follow. I was glued to each page and just when I thought that I knew who the killer was there was a sting in the tail.

As a study of the vileness of some human behaviour, I was left shaken. I found the story complex and believable - just like the characters. In Ellroy's writing there are no really good guys, just varying degrees of badness and corruption (perhaps we should exclude Russ millard here, but he was a relatively minor character). Ellroy seems to have captured what people really are like.

The book is magical and transports you to post war LA as effectively as if it were a time machine.

In the end it is a shattering, amazing and riveting study of psychosis, murder and lust. Read it!

On January 15, 1947, the mutilated body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot at 39th and Norton in the City of Los Angeles. The woman was twenty-two year old Elizabeth Short, a femme fatale who had moved from Medford, Massachusetts to Southern California as a teenager and lived an itinerant and promiscuous life in post-World War II Hollywood. Her body had been cut in half at the waist and disemboweled. It also showed signs of extreme torture. It was a gruesome murder that caught the undivided attention of the Los Angeles press, particularly the Hearst papers, as well as that of the Los Angeles police and district attorney's office. Quickly dubbed the "Black Dahlia" murder, the real-life crime remains unsolved to this day and has been a fertile source of books and articles speculating on the perpetrator of this noirish horror.

"The Black Dahlia" is James Ellroy's fictional re-working of the story, a gritty, graphic and vividly imagined crime novel that marks Ellroy as the finest, and perhaps only, contemporary successor to Chandler, Hammett and Cain.

"The Black Dahlia" is the first-person, hard-boiled narrative of Bucky Bleichert, a member of the LAPD Warrants Squad at the time of the Black Dahlia murder. Bleichert, and his partner, Lee Blanchard, are both former boxers. They also share the friendship and romantic attention of a young woman named Kay Lake, a woman with intellectual interests and a somewhat checkered past. From this starting point, Ellroy writes a fascinating, complex and cynical tale of how the fascination with the murdered Elizabeth Short-the Black Dahlia-marks the lives of all the books characters (and this book is bursting with characters and motives).

Ellroy is brilliant in developing a wide range of realistic characters, in writing and successfully resolving a complex and extraordinarily imagined plot, and in depicting the corrupt and often self-serving underbelly of the LAPD and District Attorney's office in post-World War II Los Angeles. In a tone which suggests the subversive and conspiratorial elements of Don DeLillo's "Underworld", but written in the starker style of a noir novel, Ellroy uses the real-life story to show the manipulation and corruption that often belies what we read in the popular press and what lives on in the popular imagination.

"The Black Dahlia" is not intended to be a factual accounting of the real-life murder. Rather, it is a fiction that brilliantly uses the real-life murder to develop a vivid (and at times gut-wrenchingly graphic) description of how the lurid fascination with the Black Dahlia became obsessive, fetishistic, in the lives of Ellroy's characters. If you're interested in noir, or even if you're interested in just plain good, hard-boiled crime novels, "The Black Dahlia" should be at the top of your reading list.

Everyone loves a mystery, especially when the setting is glamorous, the characters edgy, and the plot well crafted. So, sit back and get ready to enjoy The Black Dahlia, an international bestseller along with James Ellroy's other L.A. Quartet novels, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.

This novel is based on an actual event, the unsolved murder of an aspiring young actress, Elizabeth Short, in 1947. This was not just any slaying - she was a beautiful young woman whose killing was especially gruesome. Many were haunted by her death and began calling her The Black Dahlia.

Two men were more than deeply affected by the crime - detectives Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard. Both were driven to solve the killing, and through Ellroy's narrative listeners learn just how destructive obsession can be.

Some posit that this story is based on the murder of Ellroy's own mother in 1958. This occurred when Ellroy was a child and her murderer was never found. Quite obviously, this was a death that did not leave him unaffected as some may have read in his memoir My Dark Places. The parallels are obvious yet do not detract in any way from the power of Ellroy's prose or his deft construction of a dark drama.

Actor Stephen Hoye, who has appeared in films and on stage in London and Los Angeles ,delivers an expert reading of this noir tale.

- Gail Cooke

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.