How does an obsession begin?  Usually with something unknown, an experience or event outside our frame of reference with an overwhelming amount of detail.  We want to understand how it happened, to put it into context, but the matters that trigger obsessions usually resist easy categorization.   So, we dig deeper, thinking one more visit, one more review of the facts and we’ll figure out the problem and finally lay it to rest.  Obsessions don’t work like that: they’re spirals into a black hole of nothingness, they’re the itch we cannot scratch and that’s why they’re dangerous.  It’s the rare person who conquers an obsession; most survivors have to stage an escape.

Obsession is the key beneath James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia, the novel grounded in the infamous murder of Elizabeth Short, a crime that still shocks almost seven decades after it happened.  Ellroy’s novel focuses on two (fictional) detectives assigned to investigate her murder. In the post-war world of Los Angeles, officers Bleichert and Blanchard both enjoy the minor celebrity perks of being former boxers and members of the L. A. P. D. and both are reasonably happy in their lives until coincidence places them in the neighborhood when Elizabeth’s body was discovered. Although the city  becomes fixated by the case, the investigators are in danger of being consumed; Blanchard, because Elizabeth’s runaway history reminds him of a runaway sister and Bleichart because her rootless life mirrors his own.  The men comb the remnants of Elizabeth’s seedy existence for clues while reporters and politicians manipulate facts for their own gain.  As Blanchard begins to fall apart, Bleichart must unravel a maelstrom of corruption that hides Betty Short’s killer before he falls apart himself. 

The story is told in the bold, electric prose that made James Ellroy famous but his subject stimulates this question: why, of all of the murders in history, is Elizabeth Short’s one of the few that people continue to find so fascinating?  The case is still officially unsolved although you could fill a bookcase with the published tomes identifying different murderers.  Is it her beauty that draws us or her youth?  Lots of pretty girls ran to Hollywood like Elizabeth and learned the bitter difference between movies and movie-making, though few suffered as she did.  Are we drawn in by the lurid details of what was done to her body, is this what fascinates us?  This is certainly part of the part, but another part is Elizabeth herself.  Beyond a few facts we know very little of her, what she cared about, how she felt.  That cipher of a personality leaves us free to imagine what the world looked like for a young woman who liked to dress in black.  The only thing we can be sure of is that her story didn’t end well.

Ellroy’s book helps decipher her story and it helped pave the way for his strong literary career. Nevertheless, Ellroy admits that Short’s murder haunts him still, along with his own mother’s death, ten years later.  I hope he finds periods of peace in his life from time to time.  That’s the most a person can hope for when he lives with an obsession.