The Black Dahlia

Rating:
Summary: Scott Turow for the louche set
Review: Ellroy is one of the most overrated authors of recent years.

I have no problem with people liking swill, they usually do, but people with otherwise good taste seem to LOVE this pretentious twaddler.

Ellroy writes plot-dependant novels, but can't plot to save his damn life. Halfway through every one of his books, the plot breaks down, and, not that I read for plot, there's nothing else left. Save yourself time and read a good Ed McBain, Elmore Leonard, or, go to the source, Dash Hammett.

Rating:
Summary: Ellroys finest...hands down
Review: A chilling mystery by one of America's greatest writers. The Black Dahlia offers a chilling look into what might have happened in one of Hollywood's most famous unsolved mysteries. A frightening combo of 1950's Dragnet LA and Hannibal Lector. James Ellroy creates excellant round characters, extreme plots, and produces a book you can't put down. A must read time and time again. I hear they are making a film from this one.... I can't wait.

Rating:
Summary: Scary, complex, and impossible to put down
Review: I first read Ellroy when on a friends recomendation I picked up LA Confidential just before the movie came out. Between the choppy writing style, the 50's hip lingo, and complex plot full of fascinating characters LA Confidential secured a place on my all time favorite books list. In fact I loved it so much that I wanted to go back and read it again for the first time. A friend of mine told me that the next best thing would be buying a copy of Black Dahlia. I have to admit this book was not as cool as LA, but it is a great book in it's own right. I absolutely loved it! I couldn't put it down! I will warn you that it IS brutal in it's descriptions of the violence that befell Elizabeth Short in the 40's (The murder and the state of the victim as well as some other parts of the investigation are in fact horrifically true). Also the plot is so far beyond twisted that I had to reread many chapters just to keep track of what's going on. The characters are all flawed and obsessive (Though not as badly in LA Confidential) and the conclusion when it comes is well worth the wait. I highly recommend this book as well as Ellroy's latter "The Big Nowhere" and of course"LA Confidential."

Rating:
Summary: High Intrigue--High Improbability
Review: I can't deny the suspense, and how hard the book was to put down--for the first half because the main character has a likeable intelligence. Not having read any of Ellroy's other books, I was taken by his ability to capture 1940s vernacular and style, in the beginning. The plot becomes so convoluted and drawn out that the reader pulls away from it thinking "well, this started out entertaining, but c'mon now." As the plot develops the prose begins to lose its 40s edge and becomes very 90s with tons of phrases and jargon that likely didn't exist in that era. I did enjoy the police sensibility which seemed authentic to the time. The obsessiveness of the main character becomes tedious and as the story rolls along becoming more unbelievable page by page, you are left with gratuitous violence that is more shock value than substance. The book is gruesome and silly at the same time.

Rating:
Summary: MIND BLOWING IN IT'S COMPLEXITY AND IT'S STRUCTURE
Review: I first got into Ellroy through the hype surrounding the film adaptation of L.A Confidential, which I read before I saw the film (it's excellent as well) and then I got the Black Dahlia, partly out of curiousity because I heard it was loosely based on the real life murder of the authors mother (for more on this read the book 'My Dark Places') and out of admiration for the stunning detail and complexity of L.A confidential. This book, with it's out-of-control cop's, it's dark mob connections and the tragedy of the case in point is a masterpiece, by far my favourite of the 'L.A quartet'. As the central characters get pulled further apart, finally to breaking point, you feel every tension and worry they share or don't share as their story progresses. Ellroy is a genius.

Rating:
Summary: A MUST Read
Review: This is one of the best books I have ever read. Characters written with amazing depth. They pull you into their heads. Ellroy is able to present you with such a feeling of the 1950's. He has such a passion for the times and this case. He bring you on a fast, engossing rollercoster...and when it's done-you only wish it could have been longer. Also...if you read this and like it...try the "Big Nowhere", also by Ellroy.

Rating:
Summary: A razor sharp walk on the dark side of 1950's LA
Review: Action, plot, suspense, intrigue, and some of the most intensely drawn characters ever to see the printed page are all par for the course in this masterpiece from Noir virturoso James Ellroy. His characters and dialogue are as sharp as broken glass, while the web he weaves around the entire story brings everything hurtling together suicidially at the end of the novel. A must read.

Rating:
Summary: Ellroy's best, but still unbelievable
Review: The Black Dahlia is the best of the books by James Ellroy that I've read, but it's still unbelievable. I think it's a question of the prose style. Ellroy's prose is highly self-conscious, highly percussive, highly alliterative. It's loaded with slang and strange diction. It's full of sentences that you have to read two or three times to understand. The twisted syntax--not to mention the drug use, corruption and violence which permeate The Black Dahlia and Ellroy's other books--seem the work of an author whose sensibility was formed after Vietnam and Watergate. As a result, the style of The Black Dahlia comes off as anachronistic, a projection of late 20th century attitudes back onto 1940s Los Angeles. Reading the book, I kept asking myself whether people living then would express themselves in this way, whether these events were actually credible, and I kept saying no.

But if the book as a whole doesn't work, it has brilliant individual scenes, like the boxing match near the beginning, the gothic trip to Tijuana, and the hot afternoon in L.A. when the detective finally solves the murder, with each of the long-planted clues falling neatly into place. Ellroy also succeeds in "opening up" the book to give a sense of the way life is actually lived. Characters appear, go away, and come back. Someone mentions a name and tells an anecdote in a casual, chatty way, and later on the name becomes important to the solution. Or it's just an anecdote, but it builds the impression of a city and a way of life beyond the tight little circle of characters created by the mystery. Ellroy is positively generous with this kind of detail, which is so often missing from the mystery genre. And it's a talent possessed by great masters of fiction like Tolstoy and Faulkner.

If only Ellroy would stop trying so hard with his prose style. The subtext of The Black Dahlia seems to be: "I'm James Ellroy, and I'm writing this! Boy, am I writing this!"

Rating:
Summary: Good read
Review: Author John Gilmore was a bit more lenient towards his portrayal of Elisabeth Short's personality in his book "Severed", than was James Ellroy, who takes the jaded view of Beth Short, the "Black Dahlia"; that Beth was a tramp and maybe a whore. Perhaps she was. Ellroy's Beth is a girl who told too many lies to too many of the wrong people to get what she needed. In trying to attain her goals, Beth gave herself away, or sold herself, to the wrong people, and it caught up with her, ending in her brutal torture and murder, and one of the most notorious crimes in modern history.

James Ellroy also pulls us with him, head-first, into the seamy side of the police culture; a culture where the good guys are sometimes the bad guys, and yet still manage to convince themselves that they are somehow superior to "civilians".

The story was intriguing, and kept me guessing, despite clues that author Ellroy left in the book. This is how a mystery is supposed to work; the clues are there, but they don't present themselves to you in an obvious manner AS clues.

James Ellroy did a good job of weaving his fictional tale around the real-life crime of the Beth Short murder. The only flaw may be in the murder victim's anatomy: If John Gilmore's information about autopsy records is correct, then a plot which makes Elisabeth Short into a prostitute or porn actress might have problems. This is assuming of course that Gilmore's information is correct.

Aside from that, it is a good read, as Mr. Ellroy takes us through the Los Angeles of the 1940's; not the glamorous, palm tree LA of nostalgia, but the realistic, and sometimes unpleasant, LA of the real world, even in the 1940s.

Rating:
Summary: One line cannot describe the genius of James Ellroy.
Review: This book will burn holes in your brain it is so intense, so hot, so dangerous. I don't believe I have ever read a piece of literature which literally put me in a state of irrevocable shock at the world, and at humanity and its capability for evil. This is more than fiction. These charactes are caricatures of us.