The Black Dahlia (novel)

The Black Dahlia
First edition cover
Author(s)	James Ellroy
Cover artist	Jacket design by Paul Gamarello Jacket illustration by Stephen Peringer Art direction by Barbara Buck
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	L.A. Quartet
Genre(s)	Novel, crime fiction
Publisher	The Mysterious Press
Publication date	September 1987
Media type	Print (hardcover & paperback), audio cassette, audio CD, and audio download
Pages	325 pp (first edition, hardcover)
ISBN	ISBN 0-89296-206-2 (first edition, hardcover)
OCLC Number	15517895
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Classification	PS3555.L6274 B53 1987
Preceded by	Killer on the Road (1986)
Followed by	The Big Nowhere (1988)

The Black Dahlia (1987) is a neo-noir crime novel by American author James Ellroy, taking inspiration from the true story of the murder of Elizabeth Short. It is widely considered to be the book that elevated Ellroy out of typical genre fiction status, and with which he started to garner critical attention as a serious writer of literature^{[citation needed]}. The Black Dahlia is the first book in Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, a cycle of novels set in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles, which is portrayed as a hotbed of political corruption and depravity. The Quartet continues with The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.

Synopsis

The novel is narrated by LA police patrol officer Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert, a tough, pragmatic former boxer. He lives alone and friendless, and is estranged from his father, a member of the German American Bund. Bleichert despises himself for being "a stoolie"—he reported two Japanese-American friends who had been hiding to avoid being deported to Manzanar, in order to save his job after his father's ties to the Bund became known by the police. He is caught up in the Zoot Suit Riots, and meets Officer Lee Blanchard. Blanchard and Bleichert size each other up as boxers and cops, with the savvy, well-connected Blanchard sure of promotion to Sergeant, while Bleichert sees only a continuation of his mundane job as a radio car patrolman in the Bunker Hill section of L.A. Blanchard's promotion seems particularly unlikely given that he's living with a woman to whom he is not married, in violation of police policy. Even more shocking, his girlfriend, Kay Lake, is the former girlfriend of a gangster whom Blanchard arrested.

Three years later, in November 1946, Bucky and Blanchard are coerced into boxing each other. The match is a promotional tool to gain public approval for a bond measure that will give the police a bigger budget, and coincidentally an eight percent pay raise for everyone on the force. Bucky is billed as "Ice" while Blanchard is "Fire". Bucky, outweighted and outclassed, decides to throw the fight he'll likely lose anyway, to get enough money to send his father to a good nursing home where he can receive proper care for dementia. Were he to win, however, he would get a plainclothes job in the Warrants Division, and a date with Rita Hayworth. During the fight, he decides to win it, and gives it everything he has. He loses, but is able to keep his winnings honestly. He gets the job in Warrants anyway, because his performance impressed District Attorney Elliot Loew. He's partnered with Blanchard, and the two men quickly become friends. They work well together, but have a tough moment when, looking to arrest someone, they end up in a gunfight and kill four men. Meanwhile, Kay Lake comes on to Bucky, hard, and tells him she doesn't sleep with Lee. Bucky rebuffs her anyway, despite a powerful attraction, because he feels that, with Lee and Kay, he has a family for the first time, and he doesn't want to do anything to mess it up.

But it does get messed up, on January 15, 1947 when the body of a woman is found in an abandoned lot at the corner of 39th Street and South Norton Avenue, horrifically mutilated and cut in two. The woman is Elizabeth Short, nicknamed "The Black Dahlia", and the case immediately becomes a sensation, horrifying the public and overwhelming the LAPD. It appears to hit Lee especially hard—years earlier, his beloved sister Laurie vanished and was never found, and the Dahlia's tortured corpse embodies all of Lee's worst fears about what might have happened to Laurie. Bucky, for his part, finds himself developing a strange obsession with the Dahlia. He falls in love with her, seeing her troubled, nomadic, desperate existence as akin to his own.

During his investigations he comes across a beautiful woman named Madeleine Sprague, a spoiled, wealthy and promiscuous socialite and wannabe actress who greatly resembles Elizabeth Short. When he questions her, he finds she has a peripheral relationship with Short—they had sex because Madeleine was curious what it would be like having sex with someone who looks so much like oneself. She tells Bucky she will have sex with him in exchange for keeping her name out of the papers. Finding her to be a dead end anyway, Bucky agrees to suppress evidence and they begin a passionate, torrid affair, during which Bucky fantasizes she's the Dahlia as they make love. He meets her twisted family—a corrupt, cruel father (Emmett) who builds houses with shoddy, unsafe materials that have killed people in earthquakes, who brutalizes his drug-and-alcohol-addicted wife and emotionally torments his daughters Maddie and Martha, and ridicules his former best friend and business partner (Georgie), who now has been reduced to a gardener, while the father is worth millions.

Bucky gets involved in the seedy world of down-on-their luck wannabe actresses who turn to prostitution and porno films to live, and finds a porno of the Dahlia. Lee, meanwhile, runs away, seemingly to Tijuana. Bucky starts uncovering several scandals, each of which he thinks will lead him to the Dahlia's killer, but which are all dead ends. He finds police corruption that leads to a suicide and the imprisonment of an officer who had had kinky sex with the Dahlia for money shortly before she died. This upset leads him to finally surrender to his love for Kay Lake, and he breaks things off with Madeleine. Then, he undercovers some underaged prostitutes, a dope-dealing anesthesiologist who saw Elizabeth Short a few days before she died, a wife-beating, alcoholic sailor who had sex with her for money, and a whole host of different tales about Elizabeth Short that are unflattering but render her more human. She was kindly to a blind man she knew back home, she had a vivid imagination and could have been a writer, but she was also clumsy, careless, lazy, a pathological liar, and promiscuous. It turned out that she had been raped as a teenager but was rescued by some servicemen. When she saw a doctor after the rape, she learned she was infertile, so she became promiscuous with servicemen as she saw them as her saviors and as the only people who held any hope of impregnating her.

Bucky also goes to Tijuana to search for Lee, and eventually discovers he was killed by a Mexican woman, confirming it when he digs up his grave and sees Blanchard's rotting corpse. He tells Kay, and learns the truth: Lee was the mastermind behind the very big robbery that Kay's gangster boyfriend went to prison for. The guy was framed by Lee, who kept the money. Lee was being blackmailed by the one other survivor from that robbery, and that guy was one of the men Bucky and Lee killed the night of their gunfight when they killed four men—it turned out Bucky was Lee's unknowing accomplice to murder connected with Lee's theft. Bucky is horrified, but forgives his late friend, and he and Kay marry.

Two years pass, but his marriage deteriorates and his career is destroyed; he was transferred to the Science Investigation Division of the force and became a lab technician. Going out to do some routine work connected to a wealthy man who has committed suicide, he begins thinking of the still unsolved Dahlia case because the suicide lives a block from Madeleine Sprague. He ends up talking with the wealthy socialite who lives there and gets more information about the eccentric Sprague family, particularly how the doped up mother (Ramona) and Georgie would have the kids engage in highly inappropriate, gory reenactments of WWI trench warfare on the Sprague's front lawn. Bucky also eyes a painting of a clown with garish makeup that exaggerates the scar the clown has from having been cut from ear to ear, because it reminds him a lot of the Dahlia's facial mutilations. He starts becoming obsessed again, and follows Madeleine around at night. She, seeing him, has made herself up like the Dahlia, even acting like her, and picking up strange servicemen for one-night stands in seedy places. They begin an affair, causing Kay to take off. But then he starts to put more details together. The city is tearing down the last four letters of the "Hollywoodland", and as the police clear people away from the area, they find a hut with walls covered in blood and gore. They call in lab tech Bucky, and he realizes that this hut, owned by Emmett Sprague, is where Georgie lived, and Georgie killed Elizabeth Short. Fingerprinting of the hut confirms it. He goes to confront Madeleine and her father, and discovers them at home, plotting, incestuously entwined on a bed. It turns out Madeline is Georgie's daughter, that Emmett mutilated Georgie when he found out, that Georgie, son of a doctor as well as a veteran of WWI trench warfare, has a morbid fascination with dead things. He also discovers that Lee had figured it out, and blackmailed Emmett Sprague for $100,000, then fled to Tijuana, leaving the Dahlia's killer free. Bucky wants to turn them in, but knows that he will be in a lot of trouble for having suppressed evidence. So Bucky kills Georgie for some measure of justice. But then he realizes, based on the mutilated clown painting he saw, that Ramona Sprague was with Georgie, Ramona tortured and killed Elizabeth Short while Georgie was there, because she looked like Madeleine; and Emmett, Madeleine, and Martha were all accomplices, as they each knew part of what had happened. As did Kay Lake, who was the one who picked up the $100,000 for Lee. In the end, Bucky is fired, Madeleine is declared mentally ill and sent to an institution, while Emmett and Ramona Sprague go free. The novel ends with possible hope for Bucky's future when he and Kay reconcile and have a baby in Boston. And the truth about the Dahlia is never revealed.

Film adaptation

The Black Dahlia was adapted for a film of the same name by director Brian De Palma in 2005 and released in 2006. It was, however, a critical and commercial failure, with the consensus being that it had been poorly made and acted, and at times appeared incoherent. The latter fault may have been caused by DePalma's drastic editing of the finished product, which initially ran for three hours and eventually cut down to two.

See also

• Black Dahlia - Details of the murder.

External links

• Full summary of The Black Dahlia