William's Reviews > The Black Dahlia

Wow! WOW. Ten Stars Masterpiece.

Brutal and brilliant, raw and alive, elegiac and painful. A masterpiece of crime-noir and personal desire with intense action, often obscene. Warning: Adults Only.

The young police characters introduced are only partly drawn before the horrifically mutilated body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot. An extraordinarily driven tale of partner-cops, the neophyte Bleichert and the old-pro Blanchard are utterly captured by the mystery.

Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced "Cherchez la femme" that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. And in the end, she was to own the two of us completely.

Remember, the case of the Black Dahlia was real, and remains unsolved today. In the best crime-noir tradition, Ellroy provides us with a very good and dramatic solution, but this is not fact - read more here:
Wikipedia: The Black Dahlia murder case

Also know that Ellroy's own mother was murdered when he was only 10... CBS News interview with Ellroy (1998)

“It’s as if Elizabeth Short became a stand-in for my mother. I wanted to feel the horror of my mother’s death and I used Elizabeth Short as a substitute.”
- James Ellroy, Unsolved Mysteries TV series.


Elizabeth Short with unidentified man

Elizabeth Short was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in the suburb of Medford just outside of the city with four sisters. In 1930, following the stock market crash of 1929, Short's father left his car on a bridge and disappeared after losing all his money. After believing he was dead for years, she finally sent a letter to the family saying he moved to California. Short is pictured here with an unidentified man sometime in the 1940s.

Warning, Adults only: There are many horrific and violent scenes here, and a truly macabre and depraved solution to the mystery. Naked racism and misogyny abound, but there is redemption here too, with a bright hope for our hero in the final pages.

Wow. Starting the book, the meeting and growing bonds of partnership between Bucky and Lee are a rollercoaster of crime, brutality and love. They are very different, yet almost helplessly attracted to each other like the north and south poles of magnets. Ellroy then melds the enigmatic and damaged Kay between and around them in a powerfully erotic and emotional alliance.

In the early teamwork of Lee and Bucky, we see the brutality and youthful certainty of their growing power and authority. The pressure is raised and Lee and Bucky are then presented with the horrifying death of the Dahlia. Lee's emotional damage and Bucky's love for his partner drag them into a catastrophe of an investigation. Everything they hold dear and every belief they share will be ripped apart and defiled by the end of the book.

Ellroy viscerally presents the "Fire and Ice" boxing match between the two heroes, certainly the best boxing/fist fighting I have seen since the Spenser series by Robert B. Parker. This fight shows the core identity of each man, the style, the power and heart each will bring to the solution of the crime.

The way Ellroy writes the beautiful Kay to bind them even more is pure genius. Their relationship is complex, troubled, erotically charged and yet full of intense love.

The supporting police and other characters are rich and alive, but the air of a dark, brutal Los Angeles colours every moment. The police case unfolds, the politics and corruption just as we expect, but without cliché. Down we go into an ever darker crime, and the darkening souls of our heroes.

Throughout the middle section of the book, we feel the frustration of Lee and Bucky, and the other police on the case. So many dead ends, false clues, false hopes. We live this case ourselves through Ellroy's fabulous prose.

So many fall in love with the Dahlia in death, in her beauty and who she might have been. Each chapter amplifies her tragedy and her desperation.

A truly extraordinary tale. I literally could not put it down, even at 2am last night, and was mercilessly dragged to the finish at 4am. Wow.

Serious flaw in the plot:
(view spoiler)[There's no way the fire Russ started in Georgie's cottage would have burned much of the body parts and specimen jars (hide spoiler)]


There are so many extraordinary quotes and passages in this book, but my favourites all contain spoilers.

I got in the car and headed home, wondering if I would ever tell Kay that I didn't have a woman because sex tasted like blood and resin and suture scrub to me.

-

The interior was even more churchlike: velvet wall hangings depicting Jesus and his adventures decorated the entrance hall; the benches filled with lounging brownshirts looked like pews. The front desk was a big block of dark wood, Jesus on the cross carved into it--most likely a retired altar. The fat Rurale standing sentry there licked his lips when he saw me coming--he reminded me of a child molester who would never retire.

At the end, the letters from Kay, and then Ellroy's final chapter of the book are Extraordinary, some of the finest prose in all of crime noir.

Note: a young Kay Lake appears in Ellroy's Perfida, set in 1941, seven years before Dahlia.
New York Times review of Perfida



Zoot Suit 1943



3.0% "... chaotic hard prose, tough-guy dialogue, a bit too much boxing subculture."

5.0% "... after a chaotic and uneven start, Ellroy has settled down and the prose is hard-boiled delicious!"

11.0% "... great fight scene"

14.0% "... what a thrill. Wooooohooooooo!"

32.0% "... a sense of lost momentum here, sadly"

59.0% "... there's an awful lot of brutality without direction here, without purpose. That's just boring."

.