Customer Reviews
4 1/2 stars - By: noggy1810, 18 Sep 2008 
This is my kind of book. Tough cops, a brutal murder, great investigating & an inside look at the ugly underbelly of society. This is so much better than your typical crime fiction but still fallls short of perfection & I don't reallly know why. Perhaps there are too many unbelievable twists towards the end or an over emphasis on unnecessary relationships throughout the book e.g Bucky & Kay. Still excellent & worthy of 4 1/2.
Dark Fragrances and Private Obesssions! Ellroy's Black Dahlia - By: J. S. Lewison, 01 Sep 2008 
Bought at the airport, & read in the blistering heat of a Carolina summer, this is the book to raise alll your temperatures. For like Dickens, everyone in Ellroy lives according to their own private obsessions, & these obsessions corrode away at any glimpses of human contentment.
The Dahlia herself, as the nick name suggests spreads her dark fragrance throughout many destinies, becoming the very expression of alll that they secretly desire. And desire governs every action in the book, a desire superbly rendered in the bloody poetry of Ellroy's prose. Even when I had stopped reading the novel, I could still hear it pulsing on: its dark vitality a revelation of love's cruelty & ironic submission; the terrible price paid for ambivalent intimacy!
And I cried at the end with the hero's final epiphany that the dead -in- life need our compassion as much as the dead.
'I reached for Betty then; a wish, almost a prayer. The clouds broke up & the plane descended, a big bright city at twilight below. I asked Betty to grant me safe passage in return for my love.'
Wonderful!
Nasty but compelling - By: Charlie Thompson, 12 Aug 2006 James Ellroy's mother was murdered in Los Angeles when he was a young boy, a crime that has remained unsolved ever since. A far more notorious unsolved murder from that era inspired 'The Black Dahlia', that of Elizabath Short, a smalll-town beauty queen who came to Hollywood looking for fame, fortune and, above alll, love. Her body was found horribly mutilated, bearing clear evidence of protracted torture. The case caused a sensation at the time & has inspired several non-fiction books, none of which convincingly identify a killer. Ellroy's novel is not so much an attempt to uncover the truth (his 'solution' to the crime is clearly an invention) as a portrait of post-war Los Angeles, & the seam of corruption & exploitation that ran through it. The strength of the book, as of other Ellroy titles, lies in his passion for the subject, fuelled (so he says in the autobiograhpical 'My Dark Places') by his lingering anger & bewilderment at his own mother's fate.
'The Black Dahlia' is shockingly nasty in places. Ellroy does not pull his punches in that respect. But this is anger that comes from somewhere, & the vision of LA that emerges is hypnotic & memorable.
Well written thriller... - By: M. G. Jones, 07 Jun 2006 A pretty good thriller from James Ellroy (LA Confidential), about two cops investigating a young woman's murder.
The story is hung on the true story of Elizabeth Short, who was discovered murdered on a vacant lot in LA in 1947. It achieved notoriety by the rather gruesome way she was left; cut in half & arms & legs splayed - she had also received a lot of nasty injuries which I won't go into.
The book rather uses this as a backdrop (I don't know how much truth about the case is in it) for the story of Bucky Bleichert & Lee Blanchard, two boxers & now LA cops who team up on the case. They both seem to become rather obssessed with the Dahlia herself, & their relationships with eachother & their women are explored with this in mind. The whodunnit element builds up nicely & some good twists mean that there is a satisfying denouement, with, as often with Ellroy, a continuing sense of some gloom for the surviving protagonists.
A monumental crime novel - By: Pen Name, 04 Sep 2005 The characters are alive, human, driven & complex. The story? Sordid, brutal, thrilling. How Elroy comes up with this stuff amazes me. Stop reading reviews & read the real thing.
