From there we started discussing the Prologue to the novel, which in many ways is just as interesting. Ellroy’s biography, his mother’s murder and the projection of all of this onto the Black Dahlia case. Much of what I prefaced the dedication with above is what we discussed for the first half of class. And that lays the rich, complicated historical context for the novel The Black Dahlia which is in many ways provides a framework of “true crime” within which Ellroy’s masterfully written fiction about the underbelly of 1940s Los Angeles can wreak havoc.Īnd that is how we opened last night’s class (which unfortunately was not recorded), discussing the the dedication of the novel, which goes like this: And like the Dahlia case, Jean Ellroy‘s murder in 1958 remains unsolved to this day. As an adolescent Ellroy transferred his mother’s murder onto the highly publicized and grisly murder of Elizbeth Short, also known as The Black Dahlia, which occurred a decade earlier in 1947.

He said, in My Dark Places, “I knew I could link Jean and Betty and strike 24-karat gold.” When he was ready, he wrote it and it made him a star.Īnd as Bond also noted, the Freudian implications here are limitless. He knew as he was writing those early works that he needed to write the Dahlia, but that he also needed to develop as a writer in order to do it justice. As Paul Bond noted in a recent post on Ellroy:Įllroy had written a half-dozen crime/detective novels before The Black Dahlia. And in the case of Ellroy it is next to impossible, in fact his life story has all but defined his work.

It’s an image that has been burned onto my memory ever since. The fact that this guy had an image of himself as a boy at the very moment he learned about his mom’s death forever frozen in time fascinated me at first, then it started to haunt me a bit, and then it got me interested in his novels-something I am still thankful to Steve Roberts for two decades later.ĭespite the “death of the author” we’ve been living with for decades now, it’s still not all that easy to divorce a writer’s biography from their work. What struck me most from that conversation was the image of the writer as a 10 year old on the cover of that special Crime-themed issue of Granta Magazine (# 46) that was taken by the press at the exact moment he was being informed by the police his mother had been murdered. It was the Fall of 1994 and I was working at UCLA’s Audio Visual Services scheduling AV needs for the campus community when my co-worker Steve Roberts (who had amazing taste for both film and literature) started talking to me about this crazy dude who writes novels inspired by his own mother’s murder. I can remember the exact moment I heard about James Ellroy for the first time.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy