“The stench got to me, so I walked over and opened the window. James Ellroy’s This Storm is published in paperback this week by Windmill.Book Review – The Black Dahlia by James Ellmore When the LA Quartet and my Underworld USA Trilogy went into the Everyman’s Library last year, it was a very proud moment for me, and the culmination of an attempt to honour two women who had died too young: Betty Short and Jean Hilliker. It is accessible in its size and scope in a way that my subsequent books are not, but this was the opening salvo of what you might call the mature James Ellroy oeuvre.
The Black Dahlia remains a favourite for readers and my biggest seller in many countries around the world. I got a spread in People magazine, a groovy girlfriend, a marriage, then a quick divorce, and had other stupid young guy adventures. People started looking at me, and reading me, differently. It quickly became clear that I had tapped into this very rich vein of curiosity that has always attended the Black Dahlia murder case, and that readers agreed that I was on to something. I had an astonishing moment where the entirety of my later novel LA Confidential came to me in a flashīy the time The Black Dahlia was published in 1987, I had actually started to make some good money and so hired my own independent publicist who organised a trans-country book tour. I realised then that I would go on and write the LA Quartet, and knew for the first time that whatever I could conceive I could execute.
I knew pretty quickly that I was on to something, and about halfway through writing the book I had an astonishing moment where the entirety of my later novel L A Confidential came to me in a flash: the breadth of LA in the 1950s, the murders in a meat locker, scandal rag journalism, all of it. For days on end I fed my quarters into a micro fiche machine as I researched every detail of her murder.
There I secured an inter-library loan of LA newspapers from 15 January 1947 – the day Short’s body was found – to April 1947, when the investigation dwindled off the front pages. When I got together 300 bucks – which took a while – I went to the bank and withdrew it all in quarters, which I triple-wrapped in pillowcases to take to New York City and the huge public library on 42nd Street. I needed to develop a story completely antithetical to Mr Dunne’s, and so I began to think and I began to save money.
In part this was due to the great success of John Gregory Dunne’s 1977 novel, True Confessions, which had transposed 1940s Irish Catholic Hartford, Connecticut to LA. But when I started writing novels, I didn’t feel that I was up to writing The Black Dahlia.
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