THE BLACK DAHLIA

From the Publisher

Synopsis

The Black Dahlia is a roman noir on an epic scale: a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America's most infamous unsolved murder mystery—the murder of the beautiful young woman known as The Black Dahlia.

Annotation

This fictionalized version of Hollywood's most notorious murder case takes readers on a hellish journey through the movie capital and into a region of total madness.

REVIEWS

Gale Research

"Ellroy's novel is true to the facts as they are known," wrote David Haldane in The Los Angeles Times. "But it provides a fictional solution to the crime consistent with those facts." Haldane added that in tracing the Black Dahlia case Ellroy "conducts an uncompromising tour of the obscene, violent, gritty, obsessive, darkly sexual world of [Los Angeles's] underbelly in the 1940s, complete with names and places."

Salon - David Bowman

Ellroy indulges in every cliche of the genre (the two-fisted loner, the femme fatale, the twisted gunsel), but triumphantly reinvents each because he is convinced he is rebuilding noir from scratch. Hooray for delusion. In his best book, Ellroy fictionalizes the notorious true story of the murder of a Los Angeles whore (literally sliced in two), using the poor girl as a psychic stand-in for the novelist's own murdered mother.

Publishers Weekly

Based on a notorious, unsolved Los Angeles murder case, the central drama of this hard-boiled mysteryset in the late 1940sbegins when the body of Elizabeth Short, an engagingly beautiful and promiscuous woman in her 20s, is discovered in a vacant lot, cut in half, disemboweled and bearing evidence that she had been tortured for several days before dying. Dubbed "The Black Dahlia'' by the press, the victim becomes an obsession for two L.A.P.D. cops, narrator Bucky Bleichert and his partner, Lee Blanchard, both ex-boxers who also are best friends and in love with the same woman. Despite a huge effort by the department, leads seem to go nowhere, and Bucky is mortified when he inadvertently helps to suppress evidencethe apparently innocuous fact that a woman he spends many nights with, casually bisexual Madeleine Sprague, daughter of a crooked real-estate tycoon, knew "the Dahlia'' and slept with her once. Bucky begins to fear for his future, but slowly and dangerously, he learns that his is one of the tamest crimes of corruption committed by the many people he knows. Building like a symphony, this is a wonderful, complicated but accessible tale of ambition, insanity, passion and deceit, with the perfect settingof booming, postwar Los Angeles.

Publishers Weekly

Narrator Hoye firmly nails young world-weary cop Bucky Bleichert in this audio version of Ellroy's 1987 crime novel. The flawed boxer-turned-lawman becomes obsessed with L.A.'s notorious unsolved 1947 torture-murder case, as well as the secret life of his missing partner, Lee Blanchard. Hoye proves a fine match for Ellroy's hardboiled prose, shuttling easily between hard and soft tones, crystallizing Bleichert's mix of cynicism, confusion, hurt and rage. Set in booming postwar Los Angeles, this tale of ambition, deceit and obsession builds to symphonic proportions. Throughout, Hoye skillfully modulates his narration to distinctly render each character corrupt cops, city officials, pimps, GIs, Mexican bar owners, prostitutes, society matrons and even the sound of a bullet piercing canvas. Hoye especially shines during heated police interrogations, able to shift his voice on a dime. The audio includes a new afterword from Ellroy, which might have delivered more punch had Ellroy read it himself. But in terms of this gritty, sprawling novel, Hoye was unquestionably the right man for the job. Simultaneous release with the Mysterious Press paperback movie tie-in (Reviews, Sept. 4, 1987). (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Using the basic facts concerning the 1940s' notorious and yet unsolved Black Dahlia case, Ellroy creates a kaleidoscope of human passion and dark obsession. A young woman's mutilated body is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The story is seen through the eyes of Bucky Bleichert, ex-prize fighter and something of a boy wonder on the police force. There is no relief or humor as Bleichert arrives at a grisly discovery. Ellroy's powerful rendering of the long-reaching effects of murder gives the case new meaning. This should be a major book for 1987. JV

What People Are Saying

Elmore Leonard
"High-intensity prose. Reading it aloud could shatter your wine glasses."

James Ellroy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Ellroy (born Lee Earle Ellroy; March 4, 1948) is an American crime writer and essayist.

Ellroy has become known for a so-called "telegraphic" prose style of his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences. For instance:

They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn't sure he could do it. The Casino Operators Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold.

Other hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic—albeit moral—worldview. His work has earned Ellroy the nickname the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction."

Ellroy was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Geneva Odelia (née Hilliker), a nurse, and Armand Ellroy. After his parents' divorce, Ellroy and his mother relocated to El Monte, California. In 1958, Ellroy's mother was murdered. The police never arrested the perpetrator, and the case remains unsolved. The murder, along with The Badge by Jack Webb (a book composed of sensational cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, a birthday gift from his father), were important events of Ellroy's youth.

Ellroy's inability to come to terms with the emotions surrounding his mother's murder led him to transfer them onto another murder victim, Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia"; throughout his youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires. These confusions led to a period of intense clinical depression, from which he recovered only gradually.

Ellroy dropped out of school without graduating. He joined the Army for a short while. During his teens and twenties, he drank heavily and abused Benzedrex inhalers. He was engaged in minor crimes (especially shoplifting, house-breaking and burglary), and was often homeless. After serving some time in jail and suffering a bout of pneumonia, during which he developed an abscess on his lung "the size of a large man's fist", Ellroy stopped drinking and began working as a golf caddy while pursuing writing. He later said, "Caddying was good tax-free cash and allowed me to get home by 2 p.m. and write books... I caddied right up to the sale of my fifth book."

Career

In 1981, Ellroy published his first novel, Brown's Requiem, a detective story drawing on his experiences as a caddy. He then published Clandestine and Silent Terror (which was later published under the title Killer on the Road). Ellroy followed these three novels with the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, three novels following the eponymous character.

The L.A. Quartet

While his early novels earned him a "cult" following, Ellroy earned much greater success and critical acclaim with the L.A. Quartet—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. The four novels represent Ellroy's change of style from the tradition of classic modernist noir fiction of his earlier novels to so-called postmodern historiographic metafiction. The Black Dahlia, for example, fused the real-life murder of Elizabeth Short with a fictional story of two police officers investigating the crime.

Underworld USA Trilogy

In 1995, Ellroy published American Tabloid, the first novel in a series informally dubbed the "Underworld USA Trilogy", which Ellroy describes as a "secret history" of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Tabloid was named TIME's fiction book of year for 1995. Its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand, became a bestseller. The final novel, Blood's a Rover, was released on September 22, 2009.

My Dark Places

After publishing American Tabloid, Ellroy began a memoir, My Dark Places based on his memories of his mother's murder and his investigation of the crime. In the memoir, Ellroy mentions that his mother's murder received little news coverage, and the media was still fixated on Johnny Stompanato's murder. Frank C. Girardot, a reporter for The San Gabriel Valley Tribune, accessed files on Geneva Hilliker Ellroy's murder from detectives with Los Angeles Police Department. Based on the cold case file, Ellroy and investigator Bill Stoner worked the case, but gave up after fifteen months, believing any suspects to be dead. In 2008, The Library of America selected the essay "My Mother's Killer" from My Dark Places for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.

Personal life

After a second marriage in the mid-90s to Helen Knode (author of the 2003 novel The Ticket Out), the couple moved from California to Kansas City in 1995. In 2006, after their divorce, Ellroy returned to Los Angeles. He is a self-described hermit who possesses very few technological amenities, including television, and never reads books by other authors, aside from Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field, for fear that they might influence his own.

Public life and opinions

In media appearances, Ellroy has adopted an outsized, stylized public persona of hard-boiled nihilism and self-reflexive subversiveness. He frequently begins public appearances with a monologue such as:

Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is the Manson Family.

Another aspect of his public persona involves an almost comically grand assessment of his work and his place in literature. For example, he told the New York Times, "I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music."

Ellroy frequently has espoused conservative political views, which have ranged from a vague anti-liberalism to authoritarianism. In an October 15, 2009, Rolling Stone interview, Ellroy said that in the sixties and seventies "I was never a peacemaker; I was a fuck-you right-winger." He has also been an outspoken and unquestioning admirer of the Los Angeles Police Department, and he dismisses the department's flaws as aberrations, telling the National Review that the coverage of the Rodney King beating and Rampart police scandals were overblown by a biased media. Nevertheless, like other aspects of his persona, he often deliberately obscures where his public persona ends and his actual views begin. When asked about his "right-wing tendencies," he told an interviewer, "Right-wing tendencies? I do that to fuck with people." Similarly, in the film Feast of Death, his (now ex-) wife describes his politics as "bullshit," an assessment to which Ellroy responds only with a knowing smile. Privately, Ellroy opposes the death penalty and favors gun control. Of the current political environment, Ellroy told Rolling Stone in 2009:

I thought Bush was a slimeball and the most disastrous American president in recent times. I voted for Obama. He's a lot like Jack Kennedy—they both have big ears and infectious smiles. But Obama is a deeper guy. Kennedy was an appetite guy. He wanted pussy, hamburgers, booze. Jack did a lot of dope.

Methods, style and themes

Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads, rather than on a computer, and prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long.

Dialog and narration in Ellroy novels often consists of a "heightened pastiche of jazz slang, cop patois, creative profanity[,] and drug vernacular," with a particular use of period-appropriate, but now anachronistic, slang. He often employs stripped-down staccato sentence structures, a style that reaches its apex in The Cold Six Thousand, and which Ellroy describes as a "direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards." While each sentence on its own is simple, the cumulative effect is a dense, baroque style.

Structurally, several of Ellroy's books, such as The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, and The Cold Six Thousand, have three disparate points of view through different characters, with chapters alternating between them. Starting with The Black Dahlia, Ellroy's novels have mostly been historical dramas about the relationship between corruption and law enforcement.

A predominant theme of Ellroy's work is the myth of "closure." "Closure is bullshit," Ellroy often remarks, "and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass."

Ellroy has claimed that he is done with noir crime novels. "I write big political books now," he says. "I want to write about LA exclusively for the rest of my career. I don't know where and when."

Film adaptations and screenplays

Several of Ellroy's works have been adapted to film, including Blood on the Moon (adapted as Cop), L.A. Confidential, Brown's Requiem, Killer on the Road/Silent Terror (adapted as Stay Clean), and The Black Dahlia. In each instance, screenplays based on Ellroy's work have been penned by other screenwriters.

While he has frequently been disappointed by these adaptations (such as Cop), he was very complimentary of Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland's screenplay for L.A. Confidential at the time of its release. In succeeding years, however, his comments have been more reserved:

L.A. Confidential, the movie, is the best thing that happened to me in my career that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It was a fluke—and a wonderful one—and it is never going to happen again—a movie of that quality. Here’s my final comment on L.A. Confidential, the movie: I go to a video store in Prairie Village, Kansas. The youngsters who work there know me as the guy who wrote L.A. Confidential. They tell all the little old ladies who come in there to get their G-rated family flick. They come up to me, they say, “OOOO… you wrote L.A. Confidential.... Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful movie. I saw it four times. You don’t see storytelling like that on the screen anymore.” I smile, I say, “Yes, it’s a wonderful movie, and a salutary adaptation of my wonderful novel. But listen, granny: You love the movie. Did you go out and buy the book?” And granny invariably says, “Well, no, I didn’t.” And I say to granny, “Then what the fuck good are you to me?”

Shortly after viewing three hours of unedited footage for Brian De Palma's adaptation of The Black Dahlia, Ellroy wrote an essay, "Hillikers," praising De Palma and his film. Ultimately, nearly an hour was removed from the final cut, and the film was a commercial and critical disappointment. Of the released film, Ellroy told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Look, you’re not going to get me to say anything negative about the movie, so you might as well give up."

In 2008, Daily Variety reported that HBO, along with Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone, were developing Tabloid and Six-Thousand (and, presumably after publication, Blood's a Rover) for either a mini-series or ongoing series.

Ellroy co-wrote the original screenplay for the 2008 film Street Kings, but refused to do any publicity for the finished film.

As of September 21, 2009, Ellroy himself claims that "all movie adaptations of [his] books are dead".

Bibliography

• Brown's Requiem (1981)
• Clandestine (1982)
• Killer on the Road (originally published as Silent Terror) (1986)

Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

• Blood on the Moon (1984)
• Because the Night (1984)
• Suicide Hill (1985)
• L.A. Noir (omnibus edition) (1998)

L.A. Quartet

• The Black Dahlia (1987)
• The Big Nowhere (1988)
• L.A. Confidential (1990)
• White Jazz (1992)

Underworld USA Trilogy

• American Tabloid (1995)
• The Cold Six Thousand (2001)
• Blood's a Rover (2009)

Short stories and essays

• Dick Contino's Blues (issue number 46 of Granta magazine, Winter 1994)
• Hollywood Nocturnes (1994; UK title: Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories)
• Crime Wave (1999)
• Destination: Morgue! (2004)

Autobiography

• My Dark Places (1996)

Guest editor

• The Best American Mystery Stories 2002 (2002)

Documentaries

• 1993 James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction
• 2001 James Ellroy's Feast of Death
• 2006 Murder By The Book: James Ellroy
• 2010 Ellroy appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, talking about his life and influences.

Films

• 1988 Cop
• 1997 L.A. Confidential
• 1998 Brown's Requiem
• 2002 Stay Clean
• 2002 Dark Blue
• 2006 The Black Dahlia
• 2008 Street Kings
• 2008 Land of the Living
• 2009 White Jazz

Television

• 1992 "Since I Don't Have You" adapted by Steven A. Katz for Showtime's Fallen Angels.

Film adaptation

The book was adapted for a 1997 film of the same name, directed and cowritten by Curtis Hanson and starring Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, David Strathairn and Danny DeVito.

 Oscar winning winner