The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia is a crime novel by the American writer James Ellroy, published in 1987. It is the first book of his L.A. Quartet, a sequence of novels set in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s.

The novel takes the murder of Elizabeth Short as its subject. Her corpse was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles in 1947, mutilated in a way that made the case famous, and the police investigation that followed turned into a corruption scandal that spread well beyond the killing itself. Ellroy keeps the real people, places and events of the period, and then does something the historical record could not: he supplies a solution. The book is dedicated to the author's mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, who was murdered in 1958 when he was a boy, and it was the novel that moved his reputation beyond the crime paperbacks he had been writing.

His Los Angeles is a city of policemen who take money, of newspapers that decide which deaths matter and of an ambitious, ugly kind of politics, and the two detectives at the centre of the case are damaged by it in ways the plot makes plain.