For book number eight, I had the choice between:
‘Purple Hibiscus’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
‘The Famished Road’ by Ben Okri
‘The Black Dahlia’ by James Ellroy
A distinctly African flavour to the majority of the choices, but my desire to read a James Ellroy novel superseded the other two choices. I was about to enter the world of ‘The Black Dahlia’.
Goodreads summary: On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia—and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia—driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches—into a region of total madness.
‘The Black Dahlia’ in terms of the name given to Elizabeth Short and eventual effective name for the unsolved murder that ended her life in 1947 is one of true crime’s greatest mysteries. Who did kill Elizabeth Short, torturing her and mangling her body before cutting her in half and dumping her in a vacant lot? In ‘The Black Dahlia’ in terms of the book, James Ellroy uses this crime to explore the twisted lives of a bunch of Californians in a post-war America and does it with aplomb.
Sometimes there is just a perfect storm of things in a book that work for me. Links to true crime, a film noir-esque atmosphere, even a reasonable amount of the opening talking about boxing – they all worked well to engage me in the story from the moment I opened the first page. From the first few chapters that explore how Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard first became opponents, and then partners, sets us up for a relentlessly paced, loosely based in reality, hard boiled crime thriller. There is no sentimentality here: people get hurt and die, cops are corrupt and violent, love is messy and complicated.
Although the big hook for the story is the ‘solving’ of the Black Dahlia crime, with Ellroy providing a perfectly feasible explanation within the characters he created to work alongside the true narrative, it becomes much more a story about the interwoven lives of those surrounded by the case and how quickly it takes over their lives. Even when the case becomes to all intents and purposes cold, it is the desire of Bleichert and Blanchard to provide closure that causes things to spiral downwards.
Ellroy manages to manipulate both the real facts of the Short case and the more sensationalist ideas about her (such as her being a lesbian, for example) to give perhaps an even more sordid narrative than what truly happened. The bleak descriptions of dive bars, motels and eventually places in Tijuana only serve to highlight the darker nature of the world that exists at this time for many a person. Coupled with several very blunt descriptions of violence and sex, Ellroy is unflinching in his presentation of the psyche of the very wounded roster of characters and how the excesses of life drive them to poor choices almost universally.
By the end of the novel, the case is resolved, but no-one feels better off for it. Even the slightest glimpse of hope in the last few pages is tinged by an all too fresh awareness of what happened before and where things went wrong. These characters, Bleichert et al, were never designed to be happy and the expectation is that they never truly will. Too many lies and missed opportunities have come and gone; the Black Dahlia serving as the catalyst to a downfall that was probably already fated to occur.
Though bleak and unflinching in its atmosphere, ‘The Black Dahlia’ is an excellent story with compelling, flawed characters who come to life in Ellroy’s set pieces. A brilliant book that is well worth the time to read.
Scaling the TBR Pile 