L.A. Confidential tetralogy, part one: eases you in and cold-cocks you in the face.
Written: Aug 22 '01 (Updated Aug 22 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Compelling; draws you in entirely. Believable blend of fiction/history.
Cons: Such an ugly world to be drawn into! Very plot-heavy toward the end.
The Bottom Line: Well-crafted, engaging story of an obsessed cop features a sometimes laborious plot. I can't imagine anyone not being offended/upset by something here. Welcome to Ellroy 101.
toby_baldwin's Full Review: James Ellroy - The Black Dahlia
Before 1997, James Ellroy was best known within the literary community, particularly among writers and fans of crime and detective fiction. Then his 1990 novel L.A. Confidential was made into a critically-embraced film, and it suddenly became a lot easier to explain to people who Ellroy was (I started reading his books in about 1991).
L.A. Confidential can be seen as the seminal work of Ellroy's style. It is third in what is often called the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz). I have referred to it as the L.A. Confidential tetralogy in my title, because I think for me and many others, Confidential is the definitive Ellroy novel, and established the basic setup that he has used ever since. It was the second to split the third-person limited perspective between three protagonists (if one can call them that; nobody gets away totally clean in his books), and its outcome can be used as a rule of thumb for predicting how the story will turn out for the three protagonists in the Ellroy novels since (White Jazz, American Tabloid, and The Cold Six Thousand). I plan to explore this further in reviewing more Ellroy novels. It is also the first to make strides toward the staccato, machine-gun style prose that has come to dominate Ellroy's writing (more extremely with each novel, as seen in The Cold Six Thousand).
Black Dahlia, although it starts the tetralogy, has marked differences from the setup described above. The story is told in first-person perspective from one of the two main cops in the story. The structure of Ellroy's prose is also far more conventional than what would follow, though still hard-hitting. Despite these differences, there are significant thematic elements that would remain central through the rest of the tetralogy.
The story is told from the perspective of Bucky Bleichert, a boxer-turned-cop who gets his big break when the LAPD brass decides to promote a fight between him and another boxer on the force, Lee Blanchard. The duo is promoted as Fire & Ice (Bucky, as Ice, is the cold, calculating fighter who outsmarts his opponents, whereas Lee, Mr. Fire, is the hothead who beats foes' brains out with brute force), and the PR machinations go so far as ballads about the duo becoming hits on local radio stations. The hyped bout succeeds in helping a pay raise for the entire LAPD, and the two policemen's careers are off and running.
Here is where Ellroy blends factual elements into the fiction; the actual Black Dahlia murder, a brutal case involving an aspiring actress named Elizabeth Short who was found killed and mutilated (even cut in half) in 1947, enters the picture, and the fictional duo of suddenly-hotshot cops gets the case.
As if enough weren't going on already, a sort of love triangle begins to develop between Bucky, Lee, and Kay Lake, the woman with whom Lee chastely shares a house. At first this element story seems like pretty standard, straight-forward stuff, but events change the nature of the relationships (I'm trying not to give away too much). Eventually there is a different love triangle: Bucky, Kay, and the late Betty Short, for whom Bucky develops an overwhelming obsession--not just professional, but personal as well, including sexual. He even goes so far as to essentially extort sex (his love for Kay is unexpressed at this point) from Madeleine Sprague, a known associate and sometimes imitatrix of the Black Dahlia herself. This twisted sexual attraction is classic Ellroy, as is Bucky's obsession with the case. You feel him going a bit nuts as he gets deeper and deeper into it, and you are taken right along with him. This aspect of the story is at once both compelling and utterly disgusting (hence reference in one previous review's title to needing a shower afterward).
Toward the end the story plays like a standard addiction story. Bucky risks more and more in an any-means-necessary attempt to solve the Dahlia case. You know from the outset he must not succeed, since the case is still officially unsolved...but it turns out not quite that simple. I'll let you find that out for yourself.
One possible drawback for me in this (and many of his other books, particularly The Big Nowhere) is that as the mystery element of the story is revealed more toward the end, seemingly thousands of facts and details are hurled at the reader. By then I was thoroughly engrossed in the characters, and finding out what happened to them was way more urgent than how the murder investigation would end up, so I constantly fought the urge to rush through all of that to find out what happened with Bucky, Kay, and the rest. A ton of revelations come toward the end of the story, and not just revolving around the murder case; many of the main characters turn out quite different from how we are first led to perceive them. As always with James Ellroy, nobody gets away entirely clean.
This books has a pretty dark world view (though it is Disneyland compared to its sequel The Big Nowhere). Once again, here is a book not for the weak of stomach. The brutal frame-by-frame of an ugly pornographic film featuring Betty Short, another woman, and an inanimate object was a particular low point, as was the scene in which bad cop Fritz Vogel brings Bucky along to torture some phony Black Dahlia murder confessors. In short, in this book we get large doses of extremely graphic violence and ugly sex.
A lot of people mention the use of racist language in Ellroy's work. It is there, and it is disturbing. He usually doesn't put it in the mouth of the 'heroes' (or the slightly less slimy protagonists, I guess would be more accurate). For instance, Bucky uses the term 'Negroes' in his first-person narrative, but other characters use the entire gamut of racial slurs instead. I don't think that Ellroy is trying to justify or condone this behavior; I suspect it is more an attempt to be historically realistic, and reader's discomfort be damned. That sounds like Ellroy, the self-described "demon dog" of American literature. But the slurs are there, and they are hard to read, as are many highly derogatory terms for women, Hispanic people, homosexuals, and so on. Prior reviewers have said this was a personal problem of Ellroy's (i.e., he is a racist). I don't read it that way, but I don't think the book proves one view or the other. Unsettling stuff.
When dealing with a novel that has so much grime in it, perhaps the important question at the end is, "Is it worth it?" My answer is a reserved yes. The writing is top-notch, though it isn't a virtuoso performance like L.A. Confidential. It is easier to read and slightly less emotionally engaging than the sequel, The Big Nowhere, but I would recommend it more highly because Nowhere is ten times as nasty and the payoff is the most hopeless of any Ellroy novel. Dahlia has something of a redemption at the end, but does not give me the all-out emotional boost that the literary monolith known as L.A. Confidential does. For fans of Ellroy and the genre in general who don't mind the rough stuff, I would definitely recommend this book. For others, I hope my descriptions will help you decide.
On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Blac...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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