http://booklog.molehill.org/2009/04/2... ( )

This book was a bit difficult to follow at times, and I'm still not sure I understand all of the plot twists. But it was still a great read. ( )

If, as a non-initiate, you stop and try to understand it, James Ellroy's writing style will have you completely bamboozled. The way to approach it is to barrel through it at a hundred miles an hour - that's the pace it was intended to be read at - and eventually everything will start making sense by itself. Even if it doesn't there is still something exhilarating about the way James Ellroy writes: it's a guilty pleasure, and Black Dahlia features some of his best writing. If after a while you really find yourself struggling, just google on "Ellroy Glossary" and you'll pick up any number of fanzine crib sheets.
Once you get the hang of the Ellroy idiom it's quite addictive and you even start talking like that yourself a bit. Which is embarrassing.

As with all Ellroy novels I've read, in Black Dahlia the streets are mean, the characters morally bankrupt, and the plot so byzantine as to implicate every one from the chief of police to some Mexican pornographers. This is very much Ellroy's world view: fundamentally we are all ugly, and the worst of us are the ones who pretend we're not. It's very Thomas Hobbes, actually.

The plot scenario is very similar to L.A. Confidential - two cops with a strange interpersonal relationship and a common squeeze on the hunt for the perpetrator of a dastardly crime. But while the crime is much more brutal, the book itself is not so dark. Sure it isn't Ogden Nash, but it (and especially the Ellroy Lingo) frequently had me sniggering as I read. Maybe I'm just desensitised to Ellroy's morbid style.

I think the danger with Ellroy is to read too much into it; the patios is so convincing it is easy to mistake this for something deeper than it is: like Quentin Tarantino, Ellroy is the first to admit his art really is pulp fiction, despite what the critical luvvies say.

But look, bottom line, it's a cracking read, and that's all you really need to know. ( )

http://thenovelworld.com/2008/08/30/t... ( )

Distinctly dark, pessimistic, misogynistic, highly clichéd, and grinding Noir. Ellory wrote a fine novel with L.A. Confidential and I suppose fans of the genre will find this a well qualified addition to the hard-biting grit-filled novels of the L.A. Quartet. I however found this lacking in the redeeming facets that encase the Noir genre.

It does live up to its description as a highly fictionalized account of the as yet unsolved Black Dahlia case, dancing around the facts and presenting only the most sensational tabloid possibilities of Ms Short's real life and maligning her in the process, presenting its own solution, and creating characters and scenarios that continue on like Hollywood gone mad. It also, rather unpleasantly, reveals the authors negative fixation with women and his own mother (something that is actually addressed in the afterword - which I did not discover until I read it at the end and was surprised he acknowledged.) While I am glad he's worked some of these issues out - seeing these addressed in such a manner -- even in print -- is disturbing to say the least.

This has been named as part of the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. I do not agree with that assessment, but I did not create the list nor the criteria it is based upon. As you can tell I don't have a problem disagreeing with that list either! =D ( )