True Confessions

True Confessions
John Gregory Dunne
1977

Gift of Prophecy

           Looking back, i know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy ; he simply worked to assure his own future, while i skated uncertainly towards mine. It was his flat-voiced "Cherchez la femme" that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. And in the end, she was to own the two of us completely.

The Black Dahlia
James Ellroy
1987

True Confessions

Never Knew Her

I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the way her death drove them.

The Black Dahlia
James Ellroy
1987

image
Elizabeth Short
LAPD mugshot

Staring Into the Lens

         On a September night in 1943, a Santa Barbara police officer worked the camera for a routine mug shot. Staring into the lens was a 19 year old female arrested at El Paseo Restaurant's bar for underage drinking.
         The resulting black-and-white photograph, with the young woman's dark, curly hair framing a face both defiant and vulnerable, has since become iconic.
         It's the face of Elizabeth Short, known now as the Black Dahlia, who was brutally murdered in Los Angeles shortly after World War II. The 1947 crime grabbed national headlines when her body was found surgically bisected at the waist, drained of blood and bizarrely mutilated. The murder remains unsolved.

Gretchen Wenner
Santa Barbara Independant
jun 2018

                      https://www.independent.com/2018/06/07/black-dahlia-never-dies/

She Would Have Wanted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Dahlia

You'll Be Grateful

        Here's what film noir is to me. It's a righteous, generically American movement that went from 1945 to 1958 and exposited one great theme, and that theme is ....... you're fucked. You have just met a woman, you are inches away from the greatest sex of your life but within six weeks of meeting the woman you will be framed for a crime you did not commit and you'll end up in the gas chamber, and as they strap you in and you're about to breath the cyanide fumes you'll be grateful for the few weeks you had with her and grateful for your own death.

James Ellroy

image
Theo Stroomer
James Ellroy

The Black Dahlia

Thinking of Betty

       I returned to the car thinking of Betty alive, happy, in love with a guy who would never betray her. As i crossed the park i looked up a Mount Lee. There was nothing left of the panel but  "Hollywood" ; the orchestra played "There's nothing like show business".

James Ellroy
Black Dahlia
1987

Pick Up Every Waitress

         As a child, Ellroy was exposed to his mother's boozy promiscuity and his father's slovenliness and womanising. Armand Ellroy was Rita Hayworth's manager and, he claimed, her lover. His dying words to Ellroy were : "Try to pick up every waitress who serves you". 

        As a teenager Ellroy postured as a neo-nazi and was kicked out of school. He burgled his female classmates' homes to steal their panties. He became a booze and drug fiend. Later he faked insanity to escape the army, after which he was often homeless or in jail for petty crimes. He worked in a porn store. He lost his virginity to a communist whilst high on cough syrup. When he was aged 27, substance abuse nearly killed him. In between all this he found time to read hundreds of detective novels.

Dark Obsessions of the Demon Dog
Dan Jones
The Critic
2023

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2023/dark-obsessions-of-the-demon-dog/

Through the Years

       As much as i transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, i have thought about other things through the years.

James Ellroy

Stripped-Down Staccato

          Dialogue and narration in Ellroy novels often consists of a "heightened pastiche of jazz slang, cop patois, creative profanity and drug vernacular" with a particular use of period-appropriate slang. He often employs stripped-down staccato sentence structures, a style that reaches it's apex in The Cold Six Thousand and which Ellroy describes as " direct, shorter-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards".

excerpt from
Ellroy review in Justforbooks.tumblr.com

image
Alain Garrigue

https://justforbooks.tumblr.com/post/644717518661042176/lee-earle-james-ellroy-was-born-on-march-4

I Never Knew Her

           I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them.

James Ellroy
The Black Dahlia
1987

image
Elizabeth Short with
unnamed boyfriend
                                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Dahlia_(novel)

Making Brutality Beautiful

              Ellroy has a way of giving gravitas to ugliness and making brutality beautiful.

Jason Sheehan
WBUR

image
Riccardo Manelli -
Ellroy

https://www.wbur.org/npr/343414349/james-ellroys-perfidia-is-a-brutal-beautiful-police-procedural

Dahlia

      There was no blood present on the woman's body, and there was none on the grass beneath her either. Investigators determined that she must have been killed elsewhere, cleaned of blood, and then dumped in the vacant lot overnight.

excerpt from

Morgan Korzik

Black Dahlia Website

2017

                                      http://blackdahlia.web.unc.edu/the-crime-scene/

Exacted a Price

       The suppression exacted a price; years of nightmares and fear of the dark. Writing the book was only mildly cathartic; transmogrifying Jean to Betty left one woman still unrecognized.

excerpt from
My Mother's Killer
James Ellroy
GQ Magazine 2007

                                        https://www.gq.com/story/james-ellroy-murder

More True Confessions

True Confessions
Ulu Grosbard

1981
                           https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/65376/true-confessions/