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unknown
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
The Black Dahlia
James Ellroy
1987
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Elizabeth Short
LAPD mugshot
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/
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
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Theo Stroomer
James Ellroy
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
As much as i transferred my mother to Elizabeth Short 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
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
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Alain Garrigue
https://justforbooks.tumblr.com/post/644717518661042176/lee-earle-james-ellroy-was-born-on-march-4
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
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Elizabeth Short with
unnamed boyfriend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Dahlia_(novel)
