Rogue One: A Black Dahlia Story. James Ellroy uses the ‘missing week’ of notorious murderee Elizabeth Short to nuke 1940s Hollywood from orbit and take down some demons of his own. The world depicted here is stygian, this is not a beach read, but it is rivetingly written by a writer obviously, screamingly, in total command of his art. ‘Dahlia’ would be a career capper for most authors; for Ellroy, as we now know, he was just revving his engines.

“Dahlia” has far more in common with dystopian science fiction than noir or hardboiled fiction. We have a horrifying world in a Godless universe meticulously depicted, in which even the sovereignty of the human body is sliced and diced. I’m sure the academic and fan communities that Ellroy’s work has accrued would argue he is actually sui generis and while he’s obviously on a direct line down from Chandler I’m not going to disagree with that. This is the crime novel smashing through the walls of the literary novel. This is Dostoevsky goes to Hollywood.

Thank God, there is a plot and while it is serpentine Ellroy keeps tight control over it. Two ex-fighter cops – “Blanchard and Bleichert: a hero and a snitch” – encounter each other during a riot and a politically useful show-fight sets them up as partners. Lee Blanchard is shacked up in a conspicuously flashy crib with his rescued gangster’s moll Kay who is no mere cliché. Blanchard also had a sister who, natch, wound up dead and who, of course, drifts like gun smoke through his jittery psyche. He and buck-toothed, impressionable, Bleichert, ‘Fire and Ice’ as they’re dubbed, work jolly well together beating the living daylights out of various monsters until the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s bisected cadaver tears into their world like a rent in the fabric of space-time.

The Dahlia is “the most baffling piece of detective work the Department had ever seen, the disrupter of most of the lives close to me, the human riddle” and the case seriously messes with Lee ‘Benzedrine’ Blanchard and incrementally starts taking Bleichert down too. So we have multiple women cosplaying as the Dahlia in bed and out – the image of Elizabeth Short violated even after death – a meat-hook torture scene one suspects Scorsese must have read (a scene capped by the Shakespearean “So were Kay Lake and I formally joined”), a trip to that fine eatery Club Satan, Kay commenting that her ex “photographed me with animals”, a nightmare sandpit, a shack and house of horrors and more psychosexual games than ‘Love Island’. This could be, in the hands of a lesser writer, completely ridiculous and stories in which girls turning up dead overturns a whole anthill of troubles are ten-a-penny. In Ellroy’s hands, however, “Dahlia” reads like a crie de coeur which, a cursory Google informs me, the novel pretty much was.

The good stuff here is not just the prose or the whole tour de horizon, societal sweep of the novel. It’s the range of human responses depicted. It’s the empathy. It’s the sense of sickness, of soul attrition, of inner lives being corrupted. Ellroy has Blanchard and Bleichert beat each other’s brains out in the ring and has Bleichert wiping tears away when he visits his incapacitated father. He delivers a pitch black, genuinely laugh out loud Russian Roulette scene (“Five to go. Prepare for doggie heaven, Hacksaw…”). There’s also the final chapter. The final word. This isn’t a thriller. This isn’t ‘True Detective’. It’s a mournful prose poem by someone who has been to hell and back.

I anticipated Ellroy would be fairly hard work going in and indeed the richness of the prose, the slang and the argot, made “Dahlia” comparatively slow-going. Worth it though. What kept me reading was the richness of the world, Ellroy’s control, the occasional precis, the rogues gallery of characters, Bucky Bleichert’s heavily tested humanity but above all the through-the-roof beauty and brilliance of the writing.

And by ‘through-the-roof beauty and brilliance’ I absolutely do mean: ‘Fuck it, lets roll’.

In theory, THE BLACK DAHLIA is a true-to-form noir that follows the recollections of a cop through his off-color criminal investigations and backroom police politics, punctuated by the one of the worst unsolved murders in American history.

In practice, it’s a sex fantasy that occasionally remembers it’s supposed to be a detective novel.

Whether or not the reader likes the book depends entirely on how much they connect with the main character, Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert, and his partner Lee Blanchard. Most of the book is devoted to how their rising star status in the LAPD and personal friendship is decimated by the Black Dahlia investigation. The case itself frequently takes a backseat to their disagreements, to the point where any generic murder victim could fill her role in the story. She’s a tool to showcase the effects of bringing personal baggage into a murder investigation, nothing else.

The hardboiled elements are the weakest parts of the book, as it tries too hard to harken back to the glitz and grime of classic noir. Between the aggressive nonstop slang, the dozens of noir archetypes played entirely straight, and the numerous crimes encountered by the lead characters, it felt like Ellroy wanted to shove every aspect of 50+ years of tradition into a single book. Many of the book’s set pieces never quite feel real despite their gritty portrayal, and it often requires the reader to have some working knowledge of 1940s Los Angeles to make sense. The hazy veneer of the narrative also works to the book’s disadvantage, as the pacing often feel meandering and disjointed.

Meanwhile, the objectification of the Dahlia herself is uncomfortable. Ellroy has always been forthcoming about his dark lust for Elizabeth Short, and he holds nothing back here. Even so, it’s one thing for a fictional noir character, such as Carmen Sternwood in THE BIG SLEEP, to be a promiscuous mentally ill girl, but it’s another to turn a real-life murder victim into a ravenous kinky sexpot. The “they didn’t publish all the facts in papers!” excuse only holds up so far, and it’s hard not to eye roll at scenes that are supposed to be taken seriously. Combined with the fact that the Dahlia murder isn’t even the central mystery of the book, and it comes off as shameless.

To THE BLACK DAHLIA’s credit, the writing between the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s body and the introduction of the femme fatale is fantastic, and shows how fifty years of hindsight benefit the noir format. The true crime aspect of the book likewise adds a layer of unpredictability: the question isn’t just a matter of whodunit, but why weren’t they ever apprehended? The plot twists, despite relying too much on hardboiled detective clichés, are well-thought out and rarely come off as contrived despite their nature. The quality of the writing shines through the book’s preceding flaws.

It might not be a good book about the Black Dahlia murder, but it’s a decent neo-noir at the end of the day.

TL;DR: "Local Cop Spends All Waking Hours Thinking About Screwing Dead Girl, is Screwed By Dead Girl."

 

Proper review to follow tomorrow-ish. Don't know how I feel about this one yet, but I completely understand why Hollywood gave the film adaptation to the director of SCARFACE. Yeesh.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy is an intense, action-packed page turner.  Even though the unsolved murder case from the 1940's has received a lot of coverage, Ellroy's book brings it to life with beautifully drawn characters.  I  gave it five stars.

 

I purchased this on sale & read it in one sitting.  Bucky Bleichert & Lee Blanchard, ex-prize fighting boxers turned cops are now partners.  They explore this grisly torture killing.  It has far reaching consequences.  It is a haunting story.

 

"I never knew her in life.  She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them.  Working backwards, seeking only facts, I reconstructed her as a sad little girl & a whore, at best a could-have-been--a tag that could also be applied to me."

 

The language was rough but true to the times.

 

Link to purchase: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003BM9RCG

"Excel stood up. 'A question before you go.' 'Sir?' 'Did a friend tell you to push Sanderline Johnson out the window?' 'No, sir. But aren't you glad he jumped?'"

Carhop's, mutilated dogs, bagmen, incestuous thoughts and acts, kickbacks, police informants, shakedowns, strikebreakers, conyinuous shows of force... This is the world that Lieutenant David D. Klein is held, and in some cases participates in as well. Lt. Klein is the commander of the LAPD's Administrative Vice division, he has six men from Internal Affairs working under him and one trusted partner George 'Junior' Stemmons. One side note is that Klein is also an accredited attorney which he exhibits at various times throughout the book in times when professionalism is in question or as a getaway hatch when in precarious situations.To say things are on the shady side in 1958 Los Angeles would be a gross misuse of the word shady. The Los Angeles Police Department is as bent as their K9 companion German Shepherd's back leg and it is difficult to decipher who is doing what, And to whom?

The initial focus of the story is on the work behind the scenes in severing the ties that organized crime has to the boxing industry. In doing so Klein shows how his professional and personal life is one big conflict of interest as he ends up killing a federal witness that he is by rule, required to protect. You soon understand that Klein had to consider outside work in order to compensate for his law degree. He did so by participating in mob hits which earned him the nickname "The Enforcer", buying real estate with his sister Meg and becoming slum lords, tax evasion, property transactions and kickbacks, and bribary. Now that he has climbed the ranks at the police department he realizes that getting out is easier said than done. Knowing that he can't escape his mob ties, he has been forced to maneuver his way around it, and by maneuver I mean kill people that are standing in his way from freedom. What turns everything on its head is when Klein is directed by the Captain of the Narcotics Division to investigate a buglary of a known family, and gets a side job from Howard Hughes (yes, the American aviation business tycoon Howard Hughes), to follow a young starlet named Glenda Bledsoe to see if she is in breach of contract. Soon Klein will realize that he is being pulled in many different directions by very powerful figures in the city and it finally is catching up with him. He will have to make a decision on what is most important in his life or he will be burning the candle at both ends leaving his life and the lives of his loved ones hanging in the balance.

"I never said I knew; she never pressed me. Biographies, gaps: I hid Meg, she bypassed whoring. I never said I kill people. I never said Lucille K. made me a voyeur. She said I used people up. She said I only bet on rigged games. She said ranking cop/lawyer put some distance on white trash. She said I never got burned. I said three out of four - not bad."

I found James Ellroy's White Jazz to be too busy. Between inside jobs, outside jobs, inside-outside jobs, outside-inside jobs, shakedowns, the plethora of characters, and not to mention the dialogue it was hard to keep up. I really believe that I would have enjoyed this story if it weren't for the convaluted nature of the story. I didn't find my groove until about fifty pages in when the plot started to reveal itself and things began to settle down. I hope it wasn't due to me not reading the earlier books because that has never been a problem that occurred to me before, and I don't believe the author would punish me in that way. I didn't read L.A. Confidential, but I saw the movie and thoroughly enjoyed the brutality and the corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department combined with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.

Honestly Mr.Ellroy seemed much more interesting in the interviews that I read to get a better feel for what he is, than he did in this book. I believe he let the style of the story get ahead of his writing ability which inhibited my personal troubles with comprehension and overall enjoyment. As crazy as it sounds, if he would have let his natural delivery take hold, I believe the novel would have taken on an even more coarse tone than White Jazz did. In one interview he proclaimed himself to be the 'best crime writer in history', he also mentions that Dashiell Hammett is essentially a God of crime writing and Raymond Chandler is vastly overrated. While I can't agree or disagree with him on any of his claims, I can definitely see Hammett's influence while looking back at White Jazz. The narrative of White Jazz is one long, non-functioning stream of consciousness that went from tolerable to intolerable at the drop of a hat (or turn of a screw however you want to look at it). I enjoyed certain aspects of the story, and I believe the author can deliver the nasty that I love about books like this, but in the end White Jazz just didn't sing.

" Rattle rattle - I shoved Moms some change. 'Listen, have you ever seen the man staying in this room?' 'Praise Jehovah, I seen him from the back.' 'Have you ever seen him with someone else?' 'Praise Jehovah, no I hasn't.' 'When was the last time you saw the girl in my photographs?' 'Praise Jehovah, when she did that striptease at Bido's maybe four, or five days ago.' 'When was the last time she brought a trick to this front room here?' 'Praise Jehovah, maybe a week ago.' 'Where does she solicit her tricks?' 'Praise Jehovah, I don't know.' 'Has she brought the same man more than once? Does she have regular tricks?' 'Praise Jehovah, I has taught myself not to look at the faces of these sinners.' "