The Black Dahlia
- 455
- Pages
- about 8 h
- Reading time
- Film 2006
- On screen
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Our view
“The Black Dahlia” is noir at its harshest: James Ellroy turns a real, unsolved 1947 murder into a brutal portrait of Los Angeles. Some readers credit the writing, even while hating what it describes; others find the plot overloaded with twists and too long, and some say it is slow to get going. Fact and invention are mixed throughout, and the novel supplies a solution the actual case never had.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Black Dahlia (1987) is a crime fiction novel by American author James Ellroy. Its subject is the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, California, which received wide attention because her corpse was horrifically mutilated and discarded in an empty residential lot. The investigation ultimately led to a broad police corruption scandal. While rooted in the facts of the Short murder and featuring many real-life people, places and events, Ellroy's novel blends facts and fiction, most notably in providing a solution to the crime when in reality it has never been solved. James Ellroy dedicated The Black Dahlia, "To Geneva Hilliker Ellroy 1915-1958 Mother: Twenty-nine Years Later, This Valediction in Blood." The epigraph for The Black Dahlia is "Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, My first lost keeper, to love and look at later. -Anne Sexton."
Reading order · L.A. Quartet
Full order & progress →- The Black DahliaThis book
7.67.6 / 10 - The Big Nowhere
–Not ranked yet - L.A. Confidential
7.87.8 / 10 - White Jazz
–Not ranked yet
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen once.
- FilmThe Black DahliaIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.5 across 161 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 52% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Crime & mystery average of 7.6. That is how 7.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.5 | 20 | 12% |
| Hardcover | 7.5 | 141 | 88% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Black Dahlia?
It has 455 pages — longer than 71% of the ranked books in Crime & mystery.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Crime & mystery — and a score of 7.6, the closest to this book.
