The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy, 1987 ★★½

Cruising for Danger with James Ellroy

James Ellroy is the most dangerous man in fiction, sometimes even to himself.

In this, the novel that made him what he is, Ellroy beats himself up over the real-life death of his mother by recasting her as the mystery woman of the novel’s title and delving into both the gruesome facts of her torture-slaying and the dark obsession she triggers in our two main male characters, Ellroy stand-ins both. It was Ellroy’s seventh crime-fiction novel; this time it was personal:

It was one huge purpled bruise, the nose crushed deep into the facial cavity, the mouth cut ear to ear into a smile that leered up at you, somehow mocking the rest of the brutality inflicted. I knew I would carry that smile with me to my grave.

That’s Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert, a former prizefighter turned Los Angeles detective, giving us his first impression of the body of Elizabeth Short, found one January morning in 1947 on a vacant lot in a seedy section of the city. Bleichert and his partner, fellow ex-boxer Sgt. Lee Blanchard, are in the area pursuing another case, but soon they are sucked into a bottomless mystery: Who abducted Short and tortured her in such a ghastly way? And why does the perpetrator taunt police after by sending them Short’s mutilated address book, along with photos of the victim with various dates?

The real-life Black Dahlia case remains on a short list of famous brainscratchers like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer, that involve killers whose identities will likely never be known. Only in fiction can we have a chance at seeing justice done. Only what kind of justice? And who gets to dish it out?

Ellroy is a brilliant scene-setter, with a hepcat argot that is alternately hilarious and unsettling. In Black Dahlia he establishes the perfect setting to work his dark magic. Just let these lines roll over you:

We left our dressing rooms simultaneously, at the sound of a warning bell. Pushing out the door, I was an adrenaline live wire. I had chewed a big steak two hours before, swallowing the juice and spitting out the meat, and I could smell animal blood in my sweat. Dancing on my toes, I moved toward my corner through the most incredible fight mob I had ever seen.

Bleichert at this early point in the narrative is about to go up against the heavily-favored Blanchard in a boxing match organized by the Los Angeles police to curry public favor. “Wholesome white boxers are a big draw, Bleichert,” is how devious deputy district attorney Ellis Loew explains it.

Bucky has his doubts, but encouraged by the chance for some easy money betting against himself goes through with the bout, the centerpiece of a tense opening section that pulls you right in. We watch Bucky and Lee have their fight, a fantastically protracted sequence in which Bucky gives up his plan of taking a dive to slug it out to the bitter end. He winds up forging a partnership with Lee that deepens into real friendship, especially after Lee’s beautiful girlfriend Kay Lake enters the mix. Kay has a dark past, and an interest in Bucky that Lee not only tolerates but encourages.

For a while, Lee and Bucky work cases together, dubbed “Fire and Ice” by the tabloids. Lee is the hothead, wired both by Benzedrine and a righteous hatred for violence against women. They make headlines after surviving a deadly gun battle. Then, while investigating a shack where a dangerous felon is said to be holed up, they notice a commotion across the street. It’s the police finding the bisected body of Elizabeth Short, which sets the story proper into motion 65 pages in.

Elizabeth Short was only 22 when she died. She left behind a few glamour shots, a butchered body, precious few memories, and an enduring mystery. Image from http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/life_and_art/2006/09/death_becomes_her.html

Half the time I was reading Black Dahlia I wondered what crazy hoodoo he would pull next. The other half I wondered why I wasn’t that into it.

The story jumps around a lot. It’s a point in Ellroy’s general favor that you often start a chapter with some reasonable expectation of how it will end, only to find yourself thrown into something completely different. He’s as inventive a scenarist as he is a scene-setter.

But this approach becomes problematic once Elizabeth Short’s corpse enters the scene. The whole “Fire and Ice” tangent is disposed of with dissatisfying abruptness. Lee Blanchard, apparently strung out from bennies, disappears into Mexico and leaves Bucky with Kay and a whole host of questions that a sidetrip to Tijuana only partly answers.

Bucky is left to try and figure out what drove Lee, and finds he has been keeping an apartment stocked with files and crime-scene photos of the Short case.

Bucky’s own approach to the Black Dahlia mystery starts out more balanced. Early on, still with Lee, he visits Short’s father, Cleo Short, a crabby character who let his daughter live with him a while to clean up after him, then tossed her out. Bucky asks if the pretty young woman had any boyfriends. “Einstein couldn’t remember the names of all Betty’s boyfriends, and my name ain’t Albert,” Poppa replies.

This aspect of the case becomes highly important later on, when we discover through Bucky that Elizabeth lived a sordid life of random flings and freelance prostitution which drew the wrong kind of male attention. Lee seems unable to handle this revelation:

Lee said, “Are you calling your own daughter a tramp?”

Short shrugged. “I’ve got five daughters. One bad apple ain’t so bad.”

Soon after this, Lee departs for Mexico in a highly distraught state. Meanwhile, Deputy DA Loew plays up the press around the Black Dahlia for all he can, while pulling out all stops to get a big arrest. Bucky is left to ponder the point of it all:

The bulk of the information was staggering, the manpower behind it more staggering, the fact that it was all over one silly girl the most staggering of all.

But Bucky’s own healthily remote perspective gets a jolt when outside a lesbian bar he meets a rich tycoon’s daughter who had her own relationship to the dead woman. If there is a single character in the novel whose handling by Ellroy is most problematic for me, it would have to be this one, Madeleine Sprague.

It’s through her Ellroy attempts to get at the crux of the matter, both the mystery of the Black Dahlia’s murder and the underlying fascination she holds over people, including the author. Because she resembles the victim, Madeleine becomes an idée fixe for Bucky, pulling him back after he attempts a normal life with Kay.

More modern-minded readers than me will probably gag at how Madeleine the happy lesbian so readily becomes Bucky’s lover, actively pulling him back to her while she simultaneously pursues her own obsession for the Black Dahlia. “Find somebody safe?” she sneers. “You’ll be back, you know. I look like her.”

For me, the problem with Madeleine is in the way she personalizes Bucky’s growing obsession for the Dahlia, to the point where he risks life and career tracking down the murderer long after it seems everyone else in L. A. has moved on. The case itself pulls Bucky into its unhealthy vortex, until he is manhandling a fearful prostitute in his attempt to recreate what happened to poor Miss Short.

Author James Ellroy at South Norton Avenue in Los Angeles, where Elizabeth Short's body was discovered in 1947. Image by Stephanie Diani from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/fashion/10nite.html.

This is classic Ellroy territory, a cop so out-of-control he becomes a criminal in pursuit of justice. It also ties into Ellroy’s own extra-novelistic concerns, which he owns up to in his 2006 postscript. Back in 1987, he dedicated The Black Dahlia to his dead mother, dubbing it: This Valediction in Blood. Revisiting the case in connection with a Brian De Palma film adaptation, he explained why the cases are connected in his mind. Like Elizabeth Short, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy came to California to remake her life, only to wind up a brutal casualty of a maniac’s lust:

It was a salutary ode to Elizabeth Short and a self-serving and perfunctory embrace of my mother…I cut my mother down to sound-bite size and packaged her wholesale. I determined the cause of my ruthlessness years later.

Ellroy would go on to write a memoir about his mother and her murder years later, My Dark Places. It was the first book of his I read, utterly brilliant cover to cover. I have never been as satisfied since reading any of his novels, not even his most famous one L. A. Confidential which was made into one of my favorite movies.

What is it about Ellroy the fiction-writer that leaves me short? I like reading him, but his stories seem to trail off into obsessive detours and ruminations that I find myself unwilling and unable to share. Here, in The Black Dahlia, one of his best-loved works, we get a final act for the Elizabeth Short case which serves up a lot of Grand Guignol but feels like a cheat, featuring a lot of hard muscle, some gunplay, and one risible scene where a murderer explains what went down to an open window where Bucky happens to be eavesdropping. It’s a weak resolution to a sometimes-haunting story, albeit one not as haunting for me as it was for Ellroy.