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What it argues
In January 1947, the body of Elizabeth Short — a young woman who wanted to be an actress — is found mutilated in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The case quickly becomes a media circus: Short is posthumously christened the Black Dahlia, and her murder remains unsolved to this day. James Ellroy takes the actual case as the scaffolding for a novel about what happens when two LAPD detectives become consumed by a dead woman neither of them knew.
The narrator is Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert, a former boxer turned detective who is partnered with Lee Blanchard, a war-hero cop with a beautiful girlfriend named Kay. The Dahlia case tears all three of them apart in different ways. Lee becomes unhinged, disappearing into the investigation. Bucky becomes obsessed with Elizabeth Short for reasons that are partly attraction, partly guilt, partly projection. Kay becomes something more than Bucky can name. The murder investigation is real, but the novel is about the damage done to the living by an unsolvable death.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Black Dahlia is not a whodunit — the point is what the unsolvable murder does to the men who investigate it and the city that cannot stop consuming it.
- 2.
Ellroy based the novel partly on his own mother's unsolved murder, and that autobiographical weight is present on every page about a dead woman reduced to a media symbol.
- 3.
Elizabeth Short is simultaneously the novel's center and its absence — she is mostly known through rumor, projection, and others' desires, which is part of Ellroy's argument.
What it covers
Who wrote it
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His mother was murdered when he was ten, and her unsolved case haunts his work — most directly in My Dark Places, his memoir about reinvestigating her death. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz), the Underworld USA Trilogy, and numerous standalone novels. He is widely regarded as the defining voice of American noir in the late twentieth century.
