As a latecomer to the oeuvre of literary crime writer James Ellroy, I'm quite glad I started with his fifth and most personal novel — The Black Dahlia. Essentially a fictional re-telling of Elizabeth Short murder case (but it's really about the detectives who investigated her murder), the novel was (as Ellroy noted in his afterword) a way for him to deal with his own mother's murder (she was murdered in 1958)*.
Noir fiction is difficult to do well. It's too easy to come off sounding cheesy and trite because it's got such a reputation, but Ellroy has managed to marry the noir atmosphere with a damned good plot and pace, giving each character their own unique and unstereotypical traits and keeping the reader riveted.
Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard are policemen in post-war Los Angeles. They end up working together and are put on the task force set up to investigate the Black Dahlia case. The cruel murder of this 22-year old girl from Massachussetts serves as the jumping-off point for Blanchard and Bleichert's own personal obsessions, triumphs and heartbreaks.
It probably didn't help that I am already familiar with the facts surrounding the (real-life) case: I found it more difficult to be 100% absorbed by the narrative as I was constantly searching my memory to see if revelations about Elizabeth Short's background was established fact or Ellroy's fiction.
The Black Dahlia is the crime lover's crime novel — it examines some very dark elements of human consciousness that no doubt exist in the real world. Ellroy's short staccato sentences lend a sense of urgency and realism to the world of 40s LA. It isn't modern or spare, nor is it light or forgettable. It's an escape, but an escape into a world of murder, obsession and madness.
* Ellroy later wrote a memoir, My Dark Places, which details his life after his mother's murder and his own investigation — it had been a cold case for over 30 years. Highly recommended if you are a fan of crime fiction.
