Short Pieces: James Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’

Part of the ‘Short Piece on a Short Piece’ Series

Some lovely murdery crime today. My favourite of Ellroy’s novels, and one of the few books where I have consistently had a physical copy around me since I was at university some twenty-odd years ago.

So, the first line of James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia:

I never knew her in life.

Ellroy’s prose has taken on a force and life of its own since, especially in terms of its directness and terseness, and the rapidity with which simple sentences and aggressive noun/pronoun sentence openers, heavy on the anaphora, stack up. They take on a sort of boxer’s assault, raining down the blows, but the openings of these sentences then move out of the way to become almost invisible, emphasising the verbs instead. Dickens did something similar with some of his non-fiction and lists, as did Cormac McCarthy with those long run-on sentences chock full of ‘and’ (examples at the end!)

Here, however, its 1987 and Ellroy is still in his relative infancy as a writer. We get less of the machine-gun reportage and something gentler. So, let’s unpick. The ‘I’ tells us immediately that this is first-person. There’s an interesting discussion that could be had about the validity of presenting such a novel as personal experience, in that of course when a novelist claims to write as that person, they never are. How close can a writer become to the characters that they create, if those characters are far removed from them? It is a conversation that will never be fully or satisfactorily resolved because, much like actors embodying a character, writers do the same. This particular example is interesting because of Ellroy’s personal history and the way that he brings it – quite unashamedly – to his writing. His mother was killed similarly to the victim of this novel, dubbed the Black Dahlia. When the narrator tells us that he never knew her in life, it takes a very small leap to suggest that Ellroy is speaking about himself. He has made no secret of the idea that his writing has at times been a way to explore his relationship with his mother, and has written two non-fiction books about his quest to understand what happened to her and how this has affected him, entitled My Dark Places and The Hilliker Curse. Now, obviously I have brought a great deal of context and external information to a discussion of a single sentence, but this is one of those times where I feel that having that knowledge really does enrich our understanding of that sentence. It allows for a conversation about writers, their experiences, and the validity of bringing experiences to the page that are removed from our own.

Adverbial ‘never’ is very definite, isn’t it? An interesting thought experiment is to imagine the sentence written at its simplest. You could say, “I only knew her after she died”, but that’s an odd formulation because we wouldn’t consider someone to be knowable in death. How much can you know of a person when they die? Of course you have memory, and familial testimony, records, documents, etc., but that person’s vital essence is gone. They have become historical record rather than a living being. So that sentence, I think, is inferior to Ellroy’s, even if we consider variations. For example, “I knew her in death” or “I got to know her better when she died”, and this latter version carries sinister undertones indeed that would tilt towards a different kind of crime fiction, something from the point of view of a serial killer, possibly, and perhaps sow unwanted distrust for our narrator. The ‘never’ does help to establish the relationship between narrator and ‘her’, as well. A pronoun without first introducing the corresponding noun implies the narrator’s guarded familiarity rather than ignorance of her identity. But as a reader it means we ask, who is she? And that is the driving force of much of the novel. Not so much, what is her name, but what is the significance of her for this narrator and the other characters. You might ask questions here of knowledge and how a person can truly know another. After they die, a person’s life has ended and is thus quantifiable and can be opened for judgement. It is complete. So, if we assume that our narrator does now know this dead woman, then we can ask what it means to know her. What caused her death? And why is this person now of interest to our narrator? Investigations of the dead immediately bring us to detectives, the police. Foregrounding a personal connection and familiarity means that some of the stakes are hinted at. Compare this perhaps to the deliberate distance that Sebastian Barry creates in his recent novel Old God’s Time,between a retired policeman and the act of detecting:

Sometime in the sixties old Mr Tomelty had put up an incongruous lean-to addition to his Victorian castle.

I like that opening too, but for different reasons. I highlight here only how both sentences create a slightly off-kilter feeling for their readers. Ellroy is direct. She’s dead, he seems to say, and I’m going to tell you all about her. Barry approaches from a tangent. Who cares about this lean-to? But, curiously, the lean-to is incongruous, so much like the policeman living in it, it is out of place.

Finally, then, is the abstraction of ‘life’. Rather than say, “while she was alive”, it is ‘life’. It implies something grander. She was in life, and now she is out of it. Perhaps “she was alive” is too blunt, too tepid, too ordinary. Our narrator certainly feels this way. He is familiar with her, and has taken pains to learn about her after her death. It would belittle her, and his own perception of the importance of her, if he reduced her to states. She was alive, and now she is dead. It is too blunt and too unkind, and better to conceptualise her than to reduce her to a collection of atoms that have been arranged in a peculiar way.

Quotations from Ellroy, Dickens, McCarthy

Ellroy in This Storm:

He shoved out the door. He puddle-leaoped and lunged for the curb. His shoes squished and leaked. He pulled his piece and chambered a round.

Dickens in Sketches by Boz:

Uncle George tells stories, and carves poultry, and takes wine, and jokes with the children at the side-table, and winks at the cousins that are making love, or being made love to, and exhilarates everybody with his good humour and hospitality; and when, at last, a stout servant staggers in with a gigantic pudding, with a sprig of holly in the top, there is such a laughing, and shouting, and clapping of little chubby hands, and kicking up of fat dumpy legs, as can only be equalled by the applause with which the astonishing feat of pouring lighted brandy into mince-pies, is received by the younger visitors.

McCarthy in The Road:

He’d hooked up a small gas heater and they drank Coca Cola out of plastic mugs and after a while he went back to the house and wrung the water out of the jeans and brought them back and hung them to dry.