LAPD Warrant officers Lee Blanchard and Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert have a lot in common besides the striking similarity between their last names. Both of them used to be boxers but have since retired. Lee quit because his ex-gun moll girlfriend, Kay, asked him to. Bucky stopped fighting because he turned yellow when he sized up his next opponent and knew he had no chance to win. Instead he quit boxing and ratted on two of his Japanese friends to get a spot in the LAPD. Both Lee and Bucky's stars seem to be on the rise after they fight a charity match against each other to wind support for a city bond issue and pay raise for the department. Oh, and they are both in love with Kay. How's that for complicated? These two guys love each other like brothers, but they also love the same woman. Kay says that there's nothing sexual between her Lee even though they live together, and she's always making passes at Bucky. Even though he loves her, he feels there is no way he can doublecross his partner, so things seem like they will stay like that, in perpetual stasis until the arrival of the Black Dahlia murder case.
On January 15, 1947, the body of Elizabeth Short, a young wanna-be Hollywood starlet, is found in a vacant lot. I won't go into all the grisly details of the actual condition of the body since the actual crime scene and morgue photos of Elizabeth Short are readily available on the internet, but suffice it to say, this was no random killing done for rape or robbery. Short's body had been cut in half, drained of blood, and left in a ritualistic pose a la Jack the Ripper. The edges of her mouth had been cut Joker-style all the way to her ears and various other mutilations had been done to her body. Obviously, this wasn't the work of an ordinary criminal. Or at least it wasn't the work of a sane one. To me, the way the body was done shows that the killer ENJOYED what he was doing to this girl. That he took pride in what he did.
You can imagine what the press would do with this case now, and the same was true for 1947 as well. The Black Dahlia case was like the OJ Simpson or Casey Anthony circus of its time. Except with the Dahlia, there was no automatic #1 suspect. A ton of cops were taken from the normal duties to work on the case, including Lee and Bucky. Bucky doesn't want any part of it because he believes there are more important cases they could be working on. While he sees Short's murder as a gruesome crime, he doesn't feel that it is anymore important that other cases they are working. For example, they were on the trail of a psychotic pedophile when the Dahlia case starts, and they are forced to drop that investigation for the Short case. Lee, on the other hand, feels that solving the Dahlia case is his new crusade. You see, his sister was kidnapped when they were kids, and she has never been found. It's almost as if Short is his sister, that she probably ended up like the Dahlia, and is dead somewhere that he'll never find her. Lee's lack of closure about his sis ends up driving him to an obsession with the case.
Could this book be anymore timely 24 years after its initial release. It reminds me of the News of the World/Rupert Murdoch scandal that is currently ongoing. The Black Dahlia is a good example of media manipulation and exploitation back in the age when it was just beginning to emerge. The District Attorney in the novel wants the case solved not because he wants justice, but simply because the press sensationalized it so much and it made him look bad. A lot of cases were put on hold and criminals left on the streets to solve the murder of this one girl. The media is responsible for a lot of that these days. They decide whose death matters. Somebody is dying every second of every day, but we only hear about they Ryan Dunns and Amy Winehouses of the world. If Elizabeth Short had just been strangled and left in a alley somewhere, it would have just been seen as a routine murder case. It was only the condition of her body that attracted the attention of the press. In fact, if she had just been strangled, this novel would not have been written and nobody would know of this infamous case. Unfortunately, maybe this was the intent of the killer. Just look at the Norway shooter. Or the guy that shot John Lennon. Sometimes killers kill to make statements. They use physical acts of violence to try to bring their ideal world into being. I think Bucky realizes all this and just knows this case is going to be bad news, but what can he do, abandon his partner?
I actually started reading this book after rewatching LA Confidential for the first time since I had seen it at the movies in 1997. The movie was still just as brilliant and enjoyable as it was back then. Then I turned on the commentary track, which includes James Ellroy along with members of the cast and crew. And one of the first things he said was that LA Confidential is the third book in a sequence of LA police novels, the first of which was The Black Dahlia. The only other Ellroy book I had read up to this point was Clandestine. So I decided to start with the first in the series, so that's how I ended up reading this novel.
One of my questions about Ellroy is whether this is actually what cops were like back in the day? It almost seems cliched that cops had free reign to beat the crap out of prisoners to get confessions and use all sort of tricks to get suspects to talk. Of course none of their methods would fly today. We leave that to the CIA. I guess that's how you have to think about cops in the 1950s. They were more like the CIA operates today, but with even less rules. You didn't get your rights read to you back then. But I have to say, that even as bad as some of the cops are in The Black Dahlia, and as extreme as their methods are, they seem to all be searching for the truth. Even if they might keep the truth secret and crimes might go unsolved because of it. They never want to nab the wrong guy. I guess that's kind of admirable? I wonder if Ellroy ever interviewed any cops that worked back in that time to get real life experiences into his work, or whether he's just writing about it from seeing a lot of crime noir movies and reading Dashiell Hammett. While I wouldn't call this book great by any means, I liked it and will read the next novel in the sequence, The Big Nowhere.
My Grade: B
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