The Black Dahlia

Wow. This book is a mind-fuck. And that epilogue about the Hillickers? That completely shocked me, how the author would say those things about his life. Wow.

** spoiler alert ** The plot revolves around a murder mystery set in Los Angeles in the 1940s. They found an unidentified young woman disemboweled and mutilated in a vacant lot. The two detectives, both ex-boxers, become obsessed with the case to where they literally destroy their own lives to solve the case. As much as I wanted to enjoy The Black Dahlia, I found it to be a dull novel trying to be a stylistic breakthrough in crime fiction writing. Is it possible to write a crime fiction novel with no suspense at all? Active 2: The novel portrays the worst aspects of human nature and the dark side of LA in the 40s, with gross ambiance. The writing style was praised for its fast pace, but it's overrated with too much slang and testosterone-filled dialogue, lacking suspense and story building. That’s not my cup of tea. I prefer quality writing, even if it’s not “innovative”.

It started out slow, but The Black Dahlia gets its momentum a hundred or so pages in. It's a surprisingly multilayered mystery, and those looking for thrills and twists are sure to be satisfied by the time the last page is turned. Personally I thought it was a fine piece of noir - the style and language are straight from the 40's, the detectives are hardasses, the women are vamps, and LA is glamorous city with a seedy, grimy underbelly.

I still don't know if I like any of the characters because they're so damn complex, so multifaceted, so human. The cowardly hero, the good-hearted whore - I don't know who to stick my bet on, so I bet on them all. This book twisted my stomach and reminded me why I read.

With a style of its own, James Ellroy creates a dreary atmosphere about an unspeakable crime, with characters as flawed as they can be. It has a lot of amazing plot twists, good story and many interesting characters. The reason I don't give it five stars is that I found it a bit too long for my taste, sometimes forcing me through some chapters, and the other reason is that the end was more packed with twists were thrown for more awe & shock.

The Black Dahlia is based on the book by James Ellroy which is a fictionalised account of a real crime that occurring in the 1940s. If you are a fan of noir, this story may appeal. The graphic novel flows well for an adaptation, though I wasn't overly impressed with the artwork. While competent, it is rather stiff and the characters often look quite similar. Additionally, as with many noirs, your tolerance for misogyny, racism, and people generally sucking must be high as that comes with much of the genre. It's a violent book, though the plot is delightfully complex. I am not sure how I feel about the fact that it is a fictionalised account of a real person's murder, a fact I found out only after I finished reading.

I didn't know much about the story of the The Black Dahlia apart from the fact it was a true story in America in the forties. Elizabeth Short became immortalised for her disfigured and disembowelled body. First of all, I love James Ellroy's style of writing. I felt like I was in a film noir, and could picture all of the detectives, the clothes, the cars. He hit the nail right on the head in terms of language used and speech. Sometimes I find that authors can get so bogged down in making sure the speech is correct for the time period that it becomes hard to understand but this didn't happen with Ellroy. The actual story is brilliant, although I felt like it had several endings. I won't write down much detail here, but at at least two times during the book I felt it was coming to a close despite the other hundred pages. However this isn't necessarily a bad thing, when you felt everything had been wrapped up there was another strand left to unravel and pick at. The wide array of characters were brilliant and some were distinctive, but a lot of policemen could be quite similar and I would have to reread parts or go back to the beginning to remember who they were. My only other criticism is that we could be introduced to a character at the beginning, they wouldn't appear for a hundred pages, then they'd come back and we would just be expected to remember everything about them. With a lot of characters, that was quite difficult. Overall a brilliant, tense, noir thriller and I must say I was happy with who Bleichart discovered the murderer to be. It sounds quite a strange thing to say, but I was expecting Ellroy to just pluck some random person to be the killer, but he built a sound case with someone that we'd known for the majority of the story. It also made me want to research Elizabeth Short more and find out about her life.

It was my first foray into noir, and you know, I didn't hate it. In fact, I liked it.

‘The Black Dahlia’ in terms of the name given to Elizabeth Short and eventual effective name for the unsolved murder that ended her life in 1947 is one of true crime’s greatest mysteries. Who did kill Elizabeth Short, torturing her and mangling her body before cutting her in half and dumping her in a vacant lot? In ‘The Black Dahlia’ in terms of the book, James Ellroy uses this crime to explore the twisted lives of a bunch of Californians in a post-war America and does it with aplomb. Sometimes there is just a perfect storm of things in a book that work for me. Links to true crime, a film noir-esque atmosphere, even a reasonable amount of the opening talking about boxing – they all worked well to engage me in the story from the moment I opened the first page. From the first few chapters that explore how Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard first became opponents, and then partners, sets us up for a relentlessly paced, loosely based in reality, hard boiled crime thriller. There is no sentimentality here: people get hurt and die, cops are corrupt and violent, love is messy and complicated. Although the big hook for the story is the ‘solving’ of the Black Dahlia crime, with Ellroy providing a perfectly feasible explanation within the characters he created to work alongside the true narrative, it becomes much more a story about the interwoven lives of those surrounded by the case and how quickly it takes over their lives. Even when the case becomes to all intents and purposes cold, it is the desire of Bleichert and Blanchard to provide closure that causes things to spiral downwards. Ellroy manages to manipulate both the real facts of the Short case and the more sensationalist ideas about her (such as her being a lesbian, for example) to give perhaps an even more sordid narrative than what truly happened. The bleak descriptions of dive bars, motels and eventually places in Tijuana only serve to highlight the darker nature of the world that exists at this time for many a person. Coupled with several very blunt descriptions of violence and sex, Ellroy is unflinching in his presentation of the psyche of the very wounded roster of characters and how the excesses of life drive them to poor choices almost universally. By the end of the novel, the case is resolved, but no-one feels better off for it. Even the slightest glimpse of hope in the last few pages is tinged by an all too fresh awareness of what happened before and where things went wrong. These characters, Bleichert et al, were never designed to be happy and the expectation is that they never truly will. Too many lies and missed opportunities have come and gone; the Black Dahlia serving as the catalyst to a downfall that was probably already fated to occur. Though bleak and unflinching in its atmosphere, ‘The Black Dahlia’ is an excellent story with compelling, flawed characters who come to life in Ellroy’s set pieces. A brilliant book that is well worth the time to read.

If we didn't get slapped in the face all of the time to remind us that this was the 40s and things were different, if we didn't get weird scenes of fighting with the police, and if we didn't start on a weird side story of a fight that led to the partners being together, I think I would rate it higher. The actual mystery and the solution were interesting. I think it was over done in the end, I stopped believing it was even possible. It was readable though, and it was definitely noir. If you like noir novels, you will like this. I just thought it had too much grit for the sake of being gritty.