The Black Dahlia

Another brutal story, well told by Ellroy. Like LA Confidential, this may not be to everyone's taste, even to those who enjoy crime and noir, but it's certainly very good at what it is.

Also like LA Confidential, the story is set within the LA Police Department, following two main characters, Bucky Bleichart and Lee Blanchard, through their investigations of a tortured and murdered young woman. There are no angels in the story -- Bleichart and Blanchard lead twisted lives on the point of breaking, and the victim, Elizabeth Short, was broken well before her murder.

The story follows obsessions. Neither Bleichart nor Blanchard is a homicide detective, but, in their own ways, neither can look away from the Short murder. Blanchard's show more girlfriend, Kay, is drawn into the story as well, with her own twisted and nearly broken background. As the story escalates, so do the obsessions, with a kind of apocalyptic feel for the lives of everyone involved. We follow Bleichart though one more dark layer after another, tied together by Blanchard's advice, "Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that."

In a very revealing Afterword to the book, Ellroy himself describes the story as set among "psychically maimed misfits running from World War II." He also gives us insight into his own obsession with the story, based on a true event -- a story he felt compelled to tell because of his own dark experiences. It's really pretty dark all the way down, from the true event, to the author, to the novel itself.

The characters in the story are constantly tested, and many if not most fail. That's what makes the book both hard to take but also hard to look away from. It tests our baser instincts. show less

Slam bam slay you ma'am, this nouvelle noir grabbed me from the start and didn't let go until it had taken me on a long strange journey. James Ellroy's 1987 novel is based on an actual -- and notorious -- murder that took place in Los Angeles in 1947. Around the facts of the case, which was never in fact solved, Ellroy constructs an elaborate and engrossing story, featuring really crooked cops, really twisted rich people, and a really conflicted hero. Following the twists of the plot provides much of the fascination of the novel, so I won't say anything more about what happens. But the novel is a compelling evocation of a time and place (ah, the echos of Philip Marlowe et al) as well as an engrossing mystery.

The last book Ellroy wrote in conventional prose, it's still packed with violence, corruption, racism, misogyny, drugs, murder, sexual violence, sexual obsession, bad cops, and bad cops tormwented with a sliver of conscience. The search for the killer of Elizabeth Short is riven with politics and venality, and one cop who becomes utterly obsessed and his partner tagged along reluctantly for the ride, becoming drawn into the madness. Still, at heart, a tightly plotted whodunnit that unravels amidst the high-strung psychosis and melodrama.

The body of Elizabeth Short is found mutilated and the LAPD are tasked with nabbing the culprit. Superstar partners Dwight Bleichert and Lee Blanchard try to piece together Short’s missing days but with the media in a frenzy surrounding the brutal murder, making headway proves difficult. If that’s not enough, wading through the political waters of their post-war LA precinct offer an unnecessary distraction. Can the two warrants cops - dubbed Fire & Ice - put the perpetrator behind bars or will the strain of the job destroy their personal lives before they close the book on The Black Dahlia?

Despite the dark nature of the subject matter, this book was a lot of fun to read. Now, I know that sounds ridiculous - some of you may even show more begin to question my sanity - but I’m telling you, this was a blast. Ellroy fully immerses himself in the culture of post-war America and brings the reader along with him.

The cool, slick slang of the 1940s is in full force here. Snappy dialogue whips by so quickly that you’ll find yourself devouring huge chunks of the story in each sitting and making it damn near impossible to put down. I’m a sucker for hard boiled story telling and Ellroy’s opening entry into his legendary LA Quartet is not to be missed.

The Black Dahlia is the perfect example of what great noir fiction should be - interesting protagonists that we can root for but at the same time love to hate. Bucky is admirable in his quest to uncover the truth behind Elizabeth’s murder but he’s also a bit of a scumbag. He lets his temper get the better of him more often than not and seemingly carries a misplaced sense of self-righteousness at all times. He’s a multi-layered character and a great narrator for the story.

While I enjoyed Ellroy’s novel, I will admit that I found the last twenty percent or so a little unnecessary. While the author doesn't leave the reader with many questions, I felt like it would've been better if he had left the mystery more open ended. With the story itself being based on an actual unsolved murder, the need to wrap things up with a bow felt strange. That being said, Ellroy’s own mother was murdered when he was young and the person responsible has never been brought to justice. With Ellroy dedicating the novel to his mother, it’s possible that fictionalizing an ending to a legitimate unsolved murder helped the author work through some of his own issues. show less

A rare 5 star review for a detective story. The book read like Raymond Chandler on steroids. Hard boiled 1940's dialogue with the sex and violence that RC inferred. More dense and less dependence on sense of place though the seedier parts of LA and Tijuana brought you in, front and center. Threads and layers were many and well meshed with an ending that kept twisting. Rarely did I stop and think of "who was that" or miss a storyline. Bucky and Lee and Kay and the rest were almost outrageous but I bought into their desperation. JE wrote it well with dialogue and references set it in post war America that would be scowled at in these more "sensitive" times. JE really seemed to feel the heartbeat of that time and place.

Noir as a genre earned its name from the play of shadows in film. Ellroy's The Black Dahlia is neo-noir made substance, reaching under the passing shade to find an abyss of paranoid corruption. Bucky Bleichert is a rising cop, a prizefighter partnered with Lee Blanchard. The two share the newspaper monikers Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice (Bleichert is Ice), and the love of a woman who is not quite the steady girlfriend of either of them. When an ordinary warrant check leads them into a vacant lot with the tortured and mutilated body of a young woman, the two of them are thrown into a maelstrom of obsession and revenge.

Blanchard sees solving the case as a way to redeem his murdered younger sister, an obsession that drives him off the edge of the show more world and to his eventual fate. Bleichert persues his partner, the case, and a wealthy heiress with family secrets. The Dahlia, the dead girl, is a mask ripped away from Los Angeles as an uneasy boomtown, seething with racial hatreds and old crimes.

Ellroy apparently fictionalized pretty much everything he wanted, but this isn't about facts. This is about the Truth, about what's at the center of a man or woman. And it's nothing pleasant. show less

There is a great book and a not-so-great book here. In fact, it seems like two successive books - the first is an atmospheric but realistic police procedural bringing to life the Los Angeles of the late 1940s (the book was written in 1987) and the second is a piece of 'grand guignol' in which sexual obsession and the noir morals of James M. Cain's characters surge their way through a plot out of Raymond Chandler with a dash of Hammett's political cynicism.

It cannot be said that the two 'books' merge perfectly seamlessly. The use of period slang at the start can confuse rather than enlighten so that we have to contend with some linguistic confusion as well as the plot confusion essential to the atmosphere of a 'noir' novel (although the show more loose ends are tidied up neatly enough by the end).

Similarly, the obsessional aspects may thrill the reader and may be closer to the partly repressed and sometimes brutal sexuality of the period than is obvious now but they sometimes appear hysterical. The trajectory of the book from procedural to theatrical seems more like a loss of control in the author than a carefully planned artistic endeavour - it may, however, be the latter.

But, these caveats aside, the book is a great read, filled with fine writing and incident. Only the reasonable convention that you do not spoil the story for others stops me from providing more details.

The central character, the morally compromised and rather ordinary boxer-cop Bucky Bleichard, is believable and likable despite his flaws. He is run ragged by others throughout the novel but, to be fair, we don't see the twists and turns any more than he does. Part of the hysteria perhaps lies in the fact that Ellroy must make sure that the reader does not see those twists and turns unless he has a mind of exceptional cynicism, deviousness and, possibly, cruelty. Most of us don't.

As for the writing, there are brilliant set-pieces throughout and I can't mention the later ones for fear of the plot - but you could start with the description of the Bleichart-Blanchard boxing match in Chapter Four. Boxing matches have always been precisely described because they became popular through radio but this is a version from the inside.

The plot may be hysterical and some of the behaviour of the characters extreme and not entirely sane but the actual characterisation is brilliant. These are (mostly) real people and there are a lot of them. You are immersed in a world of cops who are in the front-line of an economic frontier city and whose methods and psychology are derived as much from past war service and redirected patriotism as from any other consideration.

One important credible aspect of the book is the way Ellroy positions policing in 1940s California as situated half-way between the frontier imposition of law and order of the older West and the sort of disciplined urban policing we see (mostly) today.

This is a macho buddy culture which is as defining of the male as the small town might be defining of the family, one in which migration, sex, drugs and corruption are all in the process of being corralled into some sort of order by what amounts at times to a superior form of thug - although the decent man doing a tough job is equally represented, not in our hero but in the higher-ranking officer Russ Millard and others.

Behind the police lies an uneasy relationship (as indistinct as in a Chandler novel) of official order with the other force maintaining order in the street - the businessmen-gangsters, the big business of disorder which is as interested in taming the street as the cops. America in the twentieth century is the history of big community compromising with big private enterprise for the sake of order and policing is no exception - the morality and consequences of this are for another time and place but the novel is another chapter in a long tale.

The book is highly recommended. The caveats could just be me being precious about credibility and continuity of mood. It could be that Ellroy has shown some genius in taking the Hammett-Chandler model and setting it in a realist police procedural of its time but, if so, perhaps he has been an edge too clever by half. By the end, the plot is resolved in every mechanical detail but some of the soul of the first half has dissipated. show less