BLACK DAHLIA

A meticulous study of an infamous murder, and a debunking of its conspiracy theories.

On January 15, 1947, Los Angeles police began investigating the death of Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old woman who’d been killed the night before in grotesque fashion: Her face and genitalia were mutilated, while her body was bisected across the torso, drained of blood, and left in a vacant lot. Nicknamed the Black Dahlia due to her striking head of black hair, Short became an avatar of postwar American noir and the subject of bottomless speculation about her (still-unsolved) murder, to the point of being unrecognizable as a person. Novelist and Hollywood journalist Mann (Bogie & Bacall, 2023, etc.) doesn’t aspire to solve the murder—though he does float a theory—so much as attempt to understand what it might be like for a young woman to struggle to navigate the seedier streets of Hollywood in the ’40s. She arrived in L.A. from the Boston suburb of Medford, seemingly eager to find work as an actress, but hand-to-mouth living made that difficult; she relied on the kindness of strange men for her next meal and bed, though she had a story about a fiancé to keep such men in line. What should’ve been a tragic story about a woman whose luck ran out instead became a study in the media’s eagerness to paint single women in the big city as untamed and promiscuous; soon enough, self-declared experts like LAPD psychiatrist Dr. Paul de River offered dubious and lurid claims about the killer’s motivations. Mann has plenty of admiration for the detectives working the case (which remains open, making the LAPD files inaccessible to the public), but less for the society determined to blame the victim. As a true-crime story, Mann’s approach may dissatisfy, but as sociology and an indictment of America’s misogynistic, bloodthirsty instincts, it’s a valuable book.

A sober, well-researched study of a case whose notoriety obscured its subject.