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A review by frasersimons
The Black Dahlia: The first book in the classic L.A. Quartet crime series by James Ellroy
4.0
The classic coper with insides tugging toward the truth that the descent to actually find some drags him into subcultures and recesses one doesn’t emerge from whole or fully aligned. In looking for the killer dubbed the Black Dahlia there is no good guys. The not so bad are probably the victims and the pursuit of the killer is more to scratch the itch of an answer than to adjudicate normal Justice. Bad people doing bad things with unchecked authority is the name of the game.
You can tell right away too. The parlance is steeped in racial slurs from the onset. There’s no peace, just a vice that stops, briefly, what is currently predominantly wrong. Cobbled patchworks of people working jobs that appeal for unexamined reasons. We readers know far more about the detectives than they do, all they can do is drive, never perceiving the flog that will lead them to ruin. And who knows if they’ll find any capital A answers. If they burn themselves to the quick, and if they’re lucky, maybe they’ll get ab abstraction of what happened they can hypothesize about, possibly leading to the enactment of their own broken justice.
Needless to say, this is not a happy book. But it does make a lot of sense after a while. And that’s terrifying. It’s an indictment of everyone, even the the way the public indicts the victim. It’s also pretty fair, I feel. There’s no moral ground, least of all in the manmade, concrete system erected to “police” the public. And as misogynistic as this is, it’s toward a larger purpose, aimed at a condemnation of the right things, I think. I don’t think it fully nails the larger aspects of the underlying, underlined themes just yet. But the intent is clear. I imagine the next one will be more refine, and that will be quite something.
You can tell right away too. The parlance is steeped in racial slurs from the onset. There’s no peace, just a vice that stops, briefly, what is currently predominantly wrong. Cobbled patchworks of people working jobs that appeal for unexamined reasons. We readers know far more about the detectives than they do, all they can do is drive, never perceiving the flog that will lead them to ruin. And who knows if they’ll find any capital A answers. If they burn themselves to the quick, and if they’re lucky, maybe they’ll get ab abstraction of what happened they can hypothesize about, possibly leading to the enactment of their own broken justice.
Needless to say, this is not a happy book. But it does make a lot of sense after a while. And that’s terrifying. It’s an indictment of everyone, even the the way the public indicts the victim. It’s also pretty fair, I feel. There’s no moral ground, least of all in the manmade, concrete system erected to “police” the public. And as misogynistic as this is, it’s toward a larger purpose, aimed at a condemnation of the right things, I think. I don’t think it fully nails the larger aspects of the underlying, underlined themes just yet. But the intent is clear. I imagine the next one will be more refine, and that will be quite something.