The Istoriaphile’s Corner

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…