Synopsis This violent, brutal portrait of postwar Los Angeles marked the beginning of James Ellroy's long career of portraying the darker sides of the glamorous west-coast city. Revolving around the historically infamous torture and murder of Elizabeth Short in the late 1940s, THE BLACK DAHLIA's protagonists are two cops Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard who become obsessed with the gory details of Short's demise. Meanwhile they both fall for the same woman, Madeleine Sprague, a tycoon's daughter who had once slept with Short. This grim first novel in Ellroy's "LA Quartet" is rife with corrupt cops, perverse violence, and poisoned minds--a dark ode to Hollywood's underbelly.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1988-09-01 | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Height: | 6.8 in | | Width: | 4.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 6.4 oz |
Publisher's Note This fictionalized version of Hollywood's most notorious murder case takes readers on a hellish journey through the movie capital and into a region of total madness.
Industry Reviews "Building like a symphony, this is a wonderful, complicated but accessible tale of ambition, insanity, passion and deceit, with the perfect setting of booming, postwar Los Angeles." (07/24/1987)
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