Izzy's Reviews > The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia is a thriller
Ellroy’s masterpiece
Gritty, seamy, LA noir

UGH. SHUT UP, me.

Okay, so – what’s the most important singular event that has ever happened in your life? Think of something good. Bonus points if it was tragic. Extra lives if it sullied your early youth. Mortal Kombat Fatality (in an arcade, after school in the ‘90s) if it also involved sex and your mother.

Even if this important singular event didn’t involve these specific elements, surely you must have something to contribute. A first love, a heartrending split. An abusive parent, crippling poverty – it doesn’t have to be bad, either: an early love of books fostered by the long forgotten sensation of your heavy lids slowly and rhythmically lulled to closing each night. A penchant for the macabre, or a sunny disposition. Nature played a hand, and certainly you were given your own personal reactionary template. (That penchant for the macabre, or sunny disposition – was it fostered by an innately rebellious soul? Or a genial, loyal one?) The intricacies are endless, and if we were to follow this line of thought to its very conclusion, it would lead us to some ageless mystery of life.

In 1958, James Ellroy was a small boy, and his mother was murdered. He became fixated on an earlier wave of murders in the L.A. area, in particular the case of Elizabeth Short, the “Black Dahlia.” It will never be clear if Ellroy, the boy, held that carbon deep, to be slowly polished diamond-bright with that resulting psychic mess, with drink, with obsession. Or did he start off as fresh and pink as the rest of us, and trauma did the rest?

I think it’s a combination of both, but the result is that the Dahlia and his own experience entangled deeply and became one and the same.

I’ll confess I’ve never read My Dark Places, Ellroy’s own examination of the very thing I’m clumsily trying to unravel. My concern lies more with this book of fiction.

So, now think on how your own minor or major life events have shaped you. Those little scars on your psyche. Imagine what would have become of you as a 10 year old James Ellroy. Take everything you have ever gleaned from popular culture about: Freud, sex, children, men, writers, male writers, golden Los Angeles and rotten Hollywood. Spice it with what a healthy imagination will do to a few details of shadowy, grizzly female murder. More than you know about your own mother’s death. Mix them together and stir them in a pot – no a fucking cauldron. I am asking you to take your most intense, private emotions and amplify them by 1,000. Then, feel those feelings for decades. Then, wring yourself out and drip blood onto blank pages.

Then get that shit published!