mysteriousnorse 's review for:

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

2.0

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As a noir/hardboiled fiction lover, I would like to thank Mr. Ellroy for putting everything I hate about the genre into one book, or rather four as I dragged myself through all four samey miserable novels of his original L.A. Quartet. I think my main criticism is that his characters are all mild variations on what Ellroy sees as the 40/50s man who is violent, usually sex-crazed, defined by his job, and gets obsessed very easily. Now, this type of character can work if they have charm or likeable supporting cast, but everyone's miserable here. His plots are a tangle that goes for both the profound impact of realization for his lead character and the presumed realism of only kind of making sense. The blow for the first is that his characters are two-dimensional garbage as I mentioned earlier. Th blow for the second is that he treats the end of all his books like the end of a murder mystery and explains the shit out of them for way too long. Honestly, I've seen people like the "nihilism" of this, but I think nihilism only works when you care about anything happening. The titular Dahlia herself is reduced to some plot points and disappears for large chunks of the story. I do not understand the praise.