The Black Dahlia (novel)

The Black Dahlia

1st ed. cover
Author	James Ellroy
Cover artist	Jacket design by Paul Gamarello Jacket illustration by Stephen Peringer Art direction by Barbara Buck
Language	English
Series	L.A. Quartet
Genre	Crime fiction, noir, historical fiction
Publisher	The Mysterious Press
Publication date	September 1987
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover & paperback), audio cassette, audio CD, and audio download
Pages	325 pp (1st ed., hardcover)
ISBN	0-89296-206-2 (1st ed., hardcover)
OCLC	15517895
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Class	PS3555.L6274 B53 1987
Preceded by	Killer on the Road (1986)
Followed by	The Big Nowhere (1988)

The Black Dahlia (1987) is a crime fiction novel by American author James Ellroy. Its subject is the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, California, which received wide attention because her corpse was horrifically mutilated and discarded in an empty residential lot. The investigation ultimately led to a broad police corruption scandal. While rooted in the facts of the Short murder and featuring many real-life people, places and events, Ellroy's novel blends facts and fiction, most notably in providing a solution to the crime when in reality it has never been solved. James Ellroy dedicated The Black Dahlia, "To Geneva Hilliker Ellroy 1915-1958 Mother: Twenty-nine Years Later, This Valediction in Blood." The epigraph for The Black Dahlia is "Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, My first lost keeper, to love and look at later. -Anne Sexton."

This book is considered the one that gained Ellroy critical attention as a serious writer of literature, expanding his renown beyond the crime novels of his early career. The Black Dahlia is the first book in Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, a cycle of novels set in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles. He portrays the city in this period as a hotbed of political corruption and depravity. The Quartet continues with The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.

Synopsis

Prologue

When World War II breaks out, light heavyweight boxer Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert joins the LAPD in order to avoid being conscripted into the military so that he can stay in Los Angeles to look after his elderly, dementia-addled father. However, soon his father's membership in the German American Bund is discovered, putting Bucky's career in jeopardy, and to keep his job he is forced to inform on two Japanese-American friends. Both are sent to an internment camp as "enemy aliens", causing Bucky immense guilt. During the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, Bucky meets Lee Blanchard, another boxer-turned-cop who made his name by proving that the violent pimp Bobby De Witt was the mastermind behind a notorious bank robbery. However, Lee has squandered much of the political kudos from this success by subsequently cohabiting with Kay Lake, De Witt's girlfriend, in violation of LAPD policy.

Part 1: Fire and Ice

In November 1946, Bucky and Lee are coerced into fighting a boxing match as a publicity stunt to secure a wage increase for the LAPD. The wage hike is successfully passed, and Bucky is rewarded by being promoted to a plainclothes job in the Warrants Division, with Lee as his partner. He also makes enough money from insider betting on the match to get his father into a nursing home. Bucky and Lee quickly become friends, and Bucky forms a close bond with him and Kay, seeing them as a surrogate family. For her part, Kay becomes attracted to Bucky and attempts to seduce him, revealing that her relationship with Lee is platonic, but Bucky nevertheless rebuffs her advances in order to avoid upsetting the harmonious friendship between the three of them. Bucky and Lee attract further publicity after shooting dead four hoodlums in a street shootout.

Part 2: 39th and Norton

On January 15, 1947, five days after the shootout, the hideously mutilated body of Elizabeth Short is found in an abandoned lot and becomes a media sensation, with the dead woman being dubbed the "Black Dahlia" by the press. Lee is particularly disturbed by the murder, as it reminds him of the unsolved disappearance of his younger sister Laurie, and he manages to get himself and Bucky seconded to the team working on the case, which is led by the honest and decent Russ Millard. Fritz Vogel, a thuggish detective on the team, acts as a henchman for Assistant DA Ellis Loew, who sees the publicity surrounding the Black Dahlia as a way to launch a career in politics. Loew and Vogel repeatedly try to frame innocent men in order to close the case quickly. Bucky is initially resentful of his and Lee's involvement in the media circus, wanting to return to their regular work in Warrants, but he gradually develops an obsession of his own with Short as he investigates her death and learns about her chaotic life as a transient who had affairs with multiple men, especially servicemen.

One line of enquiry leads Bucky to Madeleine Sprague, a spoiled socialite who closely resembles Short and was also a lesbian lover of hers. In exchange for Bucky suppressing evidence about her involvement with Short, Madeleine has sex with him, causing him to fantasize that she is Short. Through his affair with Madeleine, Bucky meets the rest of her family, comprising her tyrannical father Emmett, an amoral property developer; her dowdy and sickly mother Ramona; and her sister Martha, an aspiring artist. He also learns about George Tilden, an old friend of Emmett's who was mutilated in a car crash and subsequently had a breakdown and became an itinerant handyman living in empty Sprague properties.

Over the next few days, Lee becomes increasingly unstable, his obsession over the Dahlia case compounded by nervousness at the news that Bobby De Witt is about to be released from jail. When Bucky finds a pornographic film featuring Short, Lee flies into a rage and absconds to Tijuana, ostensibly to track down the man who made the film. Bucky follows, and discovers that the newly released De Witt is also in Tijuana. Before Bucky can find Lee, De Witt is murdered along with Mexican drug trafficker Felix Chasco, apparently by corrupt Rurales hired by Lee, though the Mexican police pin the blame on local thugs. Despite De Witt's death Lee fails to reappear, and Bucky returns to Los Angeles.

Bucky continues to follow up leads on the Black Dahlia case, and discovers that Vogel has been suppressing evidence because a few days before Short's death she had been hired as a prostitute by his son Johnny. Bucky coerces Johnny into confessing all this, and Vogel commits suicide while Johnny is imprisoned for soliciting and obstruction of justice.

Vogel's death makes Bucky persona non grata in the LAPD, and he is placed on two weeks' leave. He uses the time off to return to Mexico to look for Lee, and eventually learns from a San Diego private investigator that he was murdered with an axe soon after the De Witt/Chasco killings by an unknown Mexican woman, probably one of Chasco's multiple girlfriends, in an act of revenge. With the PI's help, Bucky finds Lee's corpse buried under the beach at Ensenada.

Bucky returns to Los Angeles and reports the news of Lee's death to Kay, who confesses that De Witt wasn't actually involved in the bank robbery for which he was convicted; Lee was the ringleader of the heist, and he subsequently framed De Witt in order to prevent him from abusing Kay. Moreover, the only other survivor of the bank heist, a certain Baxter Fitch, had been threatening to reveal all this, and Lee deliberately started the firefight on January 10 in order to eliminate the blackmailer (who was one of the four men he and Bucky killed). Bucky is horrified by these revelations, but forgives Lee and marries Kay, ending his relationship with Madeleine and temporarily managing to put his Black Dahlia obsession behind him.

Part 3: Kay and Madeleine

After returning from his leave, Bucky is transferred to the Scientific Investigation Detail, the LAPD's forensics unit, and the Black Dahlia investigation is effectively wound up. Over the next two years, Bucky and Kay's initially happy marriage gradually deteriorates.

In summer 1949, Bucky is assigned to collect forensic evidence surrounding the suicide of Eldridge Chambers, a neighbor and former friend of Emmett Sprague. At Chambers's house he sees a painting of a grotesque clown with a Glasgow smile, similar to Short's facial mutilations, and he learns more about the Sprague family from Chambers's widow. His interest in the Dahlia case piqued again, Bucky begins staking out the Sprague mansion and discovers that Madeleine is frequently making herself up to look like Short and picking up sailors in the same bars which Short once frequented, even imitating her Boston accent. Bucky confronts Madeleine, who explains that she has been mimicking Short in order to lure Bucky to her, having developed a sexual fixation of her own on him. The two renew their affair, and when Kay finds out she leaves Bucky.

Part 4: Elizabeth

While acting as security at the pageant to celebrate the removal of the last four letters of the "Hollywoodland" sign, former detective Harry Sears discovers a nearby shack containing a mattress covered in dried blood. He calls in Bucky, who from a forensic examination of the shack determines that it is the place where Short was tortured and killed. The shack is owned by Emmett Sprague and, remembering that George Tilden lives in empty Sprague properties, Bucky checks the fingerprints from the hut against Tilden's and finds that they match.

Bucky confronts Madeleine and Emmett, discovering in the process that they are lovers. Holding them at gunpoint, he forces the pair to come clean about their roles in the Black Dahlia case. They reveal that Tilden, the son of an anatomist, was obsessed from a young age with dead bodies and is a habitual grave robber who exhumes bodies in order to steal their organs. He is also Madeleine's biological father, having had an affair with Ramona (which is why Madeleine and Emmett do not consider their own relationship incestuous). Emmett found out about the affair and disfigured the Tilden with a knife, subsequently bribing him to claim that the injuries were caused in a car crash. Years later, in 1947, Madeleine arranged the pornographic film featuring Short, which was in fact shot in one of Emmett's houses rather than in Tijuana. Tilden witnessed the shoot, became enamoured with Short and blackmailed Emmett and Madeleine, threatening to reveal the truth about Emmett's assault on him unless Madeleine arranged for him to go on a date with Short. Emmett also reveals to Bucky which of his properties Tilden is currently living in.

Aware that he cannot publicly expose Tilden and the Spragues' part in the Dahlia case lest he be convicted for suppression of evidence, Bucky tracks down Tilden, discovering his ghoulish collection of preserved organs, and shoots him. Russ helps him cover up the extrajudicial killing. The Black Dahlia case is seemingly solved, but Bucky is bugged by a discrepancy in the case files and goes to speak to Martha Sprague, from whom he discovers that Lee had actually worked out that Emmett and Madeleine were involved in the case in the first few days of the investigation, and had used this knowledge to blackmail Emmett for $100,000. Bucky is shocked to discover that his friend deliberately hindered the investigation into a case he had seemed so emotionally committed to, and is even more shocked to discover that Kay picked up the money for Lee and was thus in on the deception. He confronts Kay, who is so ashamed that she leaves Los Angeles altogether.

Soon afterward, Bucky bumps into Chambers's widow and learns that the clown painting at her house is of Gwynplaine, a character from the novel The Man Who Laughs. Remembering that a copy of that book was found at the shack where Short was killed, Bucky discovers that Chambers bought the painting from Ramona. Bucky confronts her, and Ramona confesses that she is the real murderer. She explains that she remained in love with Tilden even after Emmett disfigured him, and bought the painting because its scarred face reminded her of him. She already hated Emmett, and came to hate Madeleine too when Emmett began taking a sexual interest in her. Thus, when she learnt that they had arranged a date between Tilden and Short, she was driven into a jealous rage. She interrupted their date, attacked Short and tortured her to death, modelling the tortures on those described in the novel and persuading Tilden to go along with it by offering to let him keep Short's organs for his collection; she subsequently sold the painting to Chambers "as an act of purging". Bucky initially intends to turn Ramona in, but hesitates when he realises that to do so would risk implicating Russ in the cover-up surrounding Tilden's death, and would also hurt the innocent Martha, who is devoted to her mother and oblivious of her crime.

While prevaricating about whether or not to arrest Ramona, Bucky discovers that Madeleine is dressing up as the Black Dahlia again. He confronts her and, desperate to get his attention, she reveals that she murder Lee in disguise in order to retrieve the $100,000 he extorted from her father. Bucky arrests her and she is declared mentally ill and institutionalised; she gets revenge by revealing Bucky's suppression of evidence, causing him to be fired from the LAPD. He does not disclose what he knows about Ramona, and the Black Dahlia case remains officially unsolved. Kay writes to Bucky telling him that she is pregnant, and the two reconcile. The novel ends with Bucky flying out to join Kay, and on the plane he prays for Short's spirit to watch over him in his new home – Boston, her birthplace.

Reception

The Black Dahlia was one of numerous neo-noir novels published in the late 1970s and 1980s. Ellroy was known as an author of crime fiction but this novel is considered to have gained him critical notice as a serious writer of literature.

Ellroy wrote three other novels in what he termed the L.A. Quartet, a cycle of novels set in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles. He portrays the city in this period as a hotbed of political corruption and depravity. The Quartet continues with The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.

Film adaptation

The Black Dahlia was adapted for a 2006 film of the same name by director Brian De Palma. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart, it was a critical and commercial failure, with the consensus being that it had been poorly made and acted. It was criticized as sometimes appearing incoherent. The latter fault may have been caused by De Palma's drastic editing of the finished product, which initially ran for three hours and he eventually cut down to two.

Graphic novel

In 2013, Matz and David Fincher adapted James Ellroy's novel into a comic called Le Dahlia noir, with Miles Hyman (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Hyman) as the illustrator. Originally published in French, it was published in English in 2016 as The Black Dahlia: A Crime Graphic Novel.

Anachronisms

The Black Dahlia has several references to characters having been committed to Atascadero State Hospital, but this institution did not open until 1954. The character Madeleine is committed there (ch. 3–5), but the hospital's patient population was historically limited to men.

Madeleine tells her father she and Bucky met at an art show at Stanley Rose's bookstore. However, that store closed permanently eight years prior in 1939.

See also

• Black Dahlia – Details of the murder of Elizabeth Short.
• L.A. Quartet

External links

• Full summary of The Black Dahlia