The Black Dahlia (James Ellroy, 1987)

Being a man attached to the hip of Stephen King and Clive Barker, I thought it was about time to try something different and, although I'm not a fan of most crime literature (eg: Simon Kernick is lazy in his writing and Karen Rose manages to weave gut wrenchingly cheesy romantic subplots into her works), James Ellroy has always intrigued me. A man who grew up reading Chandler almost exclusively, his most famous works are very much routed in the 40's/50's (and the 60's in the later USA Underworld trilogy) and this, for me, is proper crime, detectives with cigarettes lodged permanently in their lips wearing trench coats and hats, dealing with political corruption and using violence to get the information they want. It also helps that L.A. Confidential is one of my favourite films.

As an introduction to Ellroy's prose, The Black Dahlia is excellent. As you'd expect from the writer of L.A. Confidential, the story is dense but never confusing, sprawling from the murder of the Dahlia herself to the eventual, albiet fictional, reveal of her murderer's identity (in reality, the case was never solved) by way of police corruption, false leads and character subplots that help, not hinder, the main narrative. At just under 400 pages it's brief but it's packed with an almost overwhelming amount of information. Ellroy does not dwell on the needless, there is little in the way of filler here. Everything is necessary whether it be about the case itself or building upon the already complex characters.

There are no heroes as such. The majority of those we meet are crooked to the bone and those that are honest are left in ruin, including "Bucky" Bleichert, our protagonist. It ends with a whimper, not a bang, our "hero" at peace despite his life being in turmoil and his career as a cop dead. If the rest of the L.A. Quartet is anything like this (I already have The Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential whilst White Jazz is on order) I can't wait to delve into Ellroy's world again.

How they fucked up the movie adaptation I don't know.

5/5