Return to the Primal Noir: Two Modern Authors on the Black Dahlia

Abstract

The unsolved 1947 murder of a beautiful young woman nicknamed the haunts American popular culture1 and has, in the past fifteen years, inspired two of today's best crime authors to each write a historical novel using the murder as its central event. On first reading, Max Allan Collins's Angel in Black (2001) and James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia (1987) could hardly be more different, offering vivid contrasts in prose style, use of historical material, and authorial attitude toward the topic. But deeper consideration reveals some interesting similarities-for example, both books' employment of the conventions of film noir to recreate the context of the post-World War II United States. Even more important, both authors see the death of the beautiful victim, Elizabeth Short, as an indication of where our country was headed in 1947. For these two authors, writing about the Black Dahlia represents a probing of the modern United States at the moment it became the modern United States-a return to the primal noir. Film Noir and the Black Dahlia Murder In 1947, the United States found itself prosperous and at peace, the wealthiest and strongest nation in the world. Paradoxically, however, intense anxiety bubbled under the surface. The memory of the ubiquitous slaughter of World War II, fear of the atomic bomb, communist coups in Eastern Europe, the loss of China, anticommunist paranoia-all lurked in the recent past, the uneasy present, or the immediate future. One way this postwar anxiety revealed itself was in the popularity of the film noir genre. Inspired by the fiction of authors such as Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, Hollywood movies like The Big Sleep (1946) and Double Indemnity (1944) portrayed marginalized protagonists-usually private eyes or low-level hoods-struggling alone through a landscape of criminal treachery and police corruption, a shadowland that might explode into violence at any moment. Truth was ambiguous m film noir, the heroes were compromised, and many noir classics were set in Los Angeles, which even in the 1940s was seen as America's premiere existential terrain. Today it is easy to interpret the ambiguous heroes of the great films noirs as stand-ins for the United States itself, a country warily confronting a dangerous world and dealing with suppressed guilt for its part in the international bloodshed of the 1940s. Chandler's private eye Philip Marlowe, for instance, played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, maneuvers through an LA underworld populated by grifters, gangsters, pornographers, and seductive women. The Big Sleep's shadowy criminal milieu is analogous to the violent and uncertain international situation that faced our country following World War II, and the film renders this underworld with such compelling atmosphere that it has evolved into a subject of parody. Compared to corrupt insurance agent Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, however, Bogart is a shining knight errant. MacMurray, a fast-talking womanizer when his film begins, by the climax allows his lust for a femme fatale to turn him into a scheming murderer. The compromised protagonist is a recurring feature of film noir that shows up in both modern novels. It was in this queasy context that film noir met reality on January 15, 1947, when the mutilated corpse of the was discovered near the corner of Norton Avenue and 39th Street in Los Angeles.2 Elizabeth Short, a strikingly beautiful twenty-two-year-old drifter, had been tortured, murdered, exsanguinated, bisected at the waist, and dissected. The crime touched off a media frenzy and a long-term mystery. During succeeding weeks, Sgt. Harry Hansen, the Los Angeles Police Department's best detective, led a task force that attempted to trace Elizabeth Short's movements and contacts in the days prior to her death. Scrambling reporters both aided and impeded the investigation, digging up vital facts but encouraging hundreds of false tips. …