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77 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This fascination never ends, July 10, 2000
This review is from: Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (Paperback)
I grew up in Los Angeles and was a child when the Black Dahlia murder exploded across the front pages of the LA daily papers, the Times, the Examiner, and the Herald. Sensational then, this murder remains so to this day.
The murder of the young, pretty, would-be starlet Elizabeth Short was particularly gruesome. The body was found in a vacant lot literally cut in half. Both halves were lying near a sidewalk easily visible from the street. The body remained in the lot for sometime and drew onlookers. I remember the atmosphere of life in the late forties, and compared with today, we were all unabashed gawkers. There was little of the finicky nature of turning away from the horrible then. Today it seems almost as if this era is as remote from us today as is the Civil War when people turned out to watch hangings.
Gilmore takes us on his own long journey of personal discovery as well as retracing the journey of the sad and confused Miss Short from eager young hopeful in Hollywood to unidentified body on a slab in the county morgue. The Dahlia seems to have been drawn almost inexorably towards a tragic death. She is the ultimate victim, helpless and lost, wandering the streets of downtown LA until she more or less disappears only to reappear and become a legend that illustrates the fallacies of Tinseltown and the realities of life on the unromantic streets.
The strange and affecting style of this book is what sets it apart from most books in the true crime genre. For one thing, there appears to be something of an attachment by Mr. Gilmore to his subject that is vaguely perverted in itself. And his interest in the Dahlia seems, at least in part, sexual, as was the interest of many men in Los Angeles toward this displaced child/woman. Though Gilmore does his best to keep his perspective professional, his emotional connection to the woman is always there. This is what makes this book even more compelling. Sometimes I got the feeling that Gilmore was trying to find out who killed his girlfriend rather than a long dead stranger (whom he may have met as a boy). This heightens the level of excitement and anguish while stoking a certain salaciousness to the whole undertaking. It is impossible, when dealing with the Black Dahlia murder, to separate objective police research with an undercurrent of lascivious interest in her. Who was she having sex with? What was she doing to the men and what were they doing to her? These thoughts permeate the case and cannot be brushed away through a pretense of "getting to the bottom" of something. And Gilmore more than understands this. He does not exploit it so much as acknowledges it; it's part of who and what the whole case has always been about.
The reader will find him or herself unable to look away, much as people did in those days. The more horrible the death, the prettier the victim, the more we looked. And the fact that the body was naked simply engulfed the public in a salacious atmosphere that resembles the old circus "freak shows" where we paid a quarter to stare at people who were disabled or stricken with some awful disease. This kind of thing gives a kind of imprimatur to our rude and ghoulish interest. After all, this was a famous murder. How can we not be interested? It is on this basis that "Severed" is so attractive to us. It's a book, with evidence, with hard detective work and some interesting speculation on the part of Gilmore that offers a new possibility as to who she was and to who might have been, in fact, her murderer. There are facts revealed in this book that were new, at least to me. The hint of a sexual dysfunction that Miss Short suffered from only makes the whole thing more even more gothic.
All in all, I believe that this book should be considered a masterpiece of its kind. It does what novels try to do. It involves the reader even when the reader wishes to remain clear and objective. We follow the Dahlia all the way to the place where she was (possibly) killed. We watch the murder and dismemberment. We watch the dumping of the body and we stand on the sidewalk with the other curious citizens whispering and craning our necks for a better view. All in all, this is a cathartic work that allows us to exercise our baser instincts in safety. But it must have haunted Mr. Gilmore for many years, both before and after he wrote it. All in all, a terrific book.
That is, of course, if you like that sort of thing.
EKW
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73 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Definitive Acc ount, December 29, 2001
This review is from: Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (Paperback)
First, I take exception to 'another' reviewer's off base remarks with regard to the veracity and facts in this book. The actor, Franchot Tone, did try to pick up Ms. Short, unsuccessfully, and the Tone family has its own reasons to keep this factoid under wraps, second, the LAPD has had a Metro Division since 1933, in what is now Parker Center, and was in Room 114. Third, the detective, Herman Willis, was an actual detective at the time of the murder. These accounts can be easily verified on the Internet, and pointing them out as errors is more reflective of the critic/LA Times reporter's personal agenda rather than actual fact. The book is actually an extremely well-written, thoughtful and evocative account of this girl's descent into the quagmire of 1940's Hollywood, the absolute worst of the worst in terms of decadence and predatory types. She sought out the kind of people who were involved in petty schemes and nefarious doings and eventually encountered her killer in this melange of monsters. Her sole focus was on fame, and she did whatever she could to attain what she hoped would be a career in front of the cameras. There were plenty of criminal types who preyed on these girls, and would tell them anything they wanted to hear in order to take advantage of them and their dreams; unfortunately for Ms. Short, she went with the demon who tortured her for, what the coroner later speculated was a 72 hour torture session, and never saw her name up in lights, but achieved a grislier fame, as that of a victim who died such a terrible death that it is talked about and argued to this day, some 54 years later. Gilmore is a master of setting the mood of L.A. in the 1940's, replete with all the peripheral characters Hollywood was overflowing with and taking the reaader to the streets of same...his descriptions and attention to detail add to the rich mix of sin and glamour, the quest of which cost this doomed young girl her life. One cannot truly imagine what she endured waiting for death to release her from the horror of the things which were perpetrated on her body during those last agonal hours... Kudos to Mr. Gilmore for providing us with this incisive glimpse into a world long gone but brought back vividly to life, and giving us a taste of what Hollywood and this crime were really like and how they relate so well to each other; the perfect stage setting and the perfect crime, since no one has ever been charged, nor is likely to be at this late date. Also recommended: Hollywood Babylon, Day of the Locust
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36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
TRUE CRIME CAN'T GET ANY BETTER!, January 26, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (Paperback)
It's understandable that a small handful of would-be or wanna be investigative writers would want to throw rocks at this book, SEVERED; because it's a great book that gets you where you live, or as the upfront boys say, grabs you where it hurts! Because John Gilmore has written an emotionally and psychologically troubling book; the most mysterious and bizarre account I have ever read concerning an 'unsolved' murder in Los Angeles. This book must be considered the definitive history on the famous Black Dahlia murder case of 1947. The murder case is still in the news, still in the mainstream press. It also appears that this case is woven into the experience of the author, a major plus for the readers! Born in Los Angeles, Gilmore's father was a policeman with the Los Angeles police department (a wonderful photo of his father is at the front of the book, dressed in the 40's LAPD uniform and standing beside the old black-and-white squad car, like the ones we see in the film noir movies). Author Gilmore is no newcomer to the crime field; I have read his other books, one on Charles Schmid, the killer in Arizona, recently published as COLD-BLOODED, and his book on Charles Manson, THE GARBAGE PEOPLE. But it appears that this book, SEVERED, is his major work in the true crime field. This book is written with the same sureness that a Zen marksman uses in hitting a target. The reader will most assuredly have nightmares about Elizabeth Short, the young woman this tale concerns itself with as she wages a losing battle with survival. Almost too painful at moments to read, but it keeps getting deeper, and deeper into this girl. Her beauty, it seems, is a curse; she is too young to get ahead in the hard, hard town of Hollywood, and she literally dies trying. Apart from this amazing portrait of a young woman caught in the L.A. web (thugs, crooks, gangsters), what I found most fascinating was the author's personal link to the case, to the murder (via his father, a cop doing legwork on the case in the late 1940's), his family (the name Short crops up, which brings about an encounter with the actual victim when the author was 11 years of age). These things seem at the root of Gilmore's interest or obsession with the case, the victim, and certainly his years of efforts at closing in on a plausible suspect. He tracks the participants, no doubt followed some to their death beds, hounded police and newsmen alike, and spent decades on an otherwise 'officially' futile investigation. Again and again he returns to the same subject, the strange and haunting personality of the Black Dahlia herself, would-be actress, L.A. fringe girl and drifter during the War and that lost, merry-go-round of post-war Hollywood. This book is a real life thriller and one you will stick with to the end, despite a few spots that could raise a few nit-picking questions. It is a must read for anyone interested in true crime, police, hard-boiled, dark writing or seeking a real experience: being plunged back into L.A's. past, those swing-shift war yeras of the west coast. But this story seems to hit all coasts, east, west and inbetween as we follow the black Dahlia on her torturous journey. The photos are shocking, but this is a frightening tale, and told by a strong writer, a new voice echoing some of the old hard-boiled school of pretty gals and gunshoe cops. But reader beware: this tale sneaks up on you, and will shake you up before you know it.
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