Hots on for Nowhere

James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia may or may not be his best book. It’s the first book in his LA Quartet and certainly his first major work. I read early period Ellroy about eight years ago and none of it resonates save for his first book Brown’s Requiem which was not good. The Black Dahlia is something quite different from early Ellroy and the entire hardboiled genre. It’s a procedural with a first person narration, and that’s about the end of similarities with other novels set in postwar LA. The narrator is a buck tooth pug turned cop named Bucky. Children make fun of his face. He has a Kraut father who had a wartime crush on Hitler. Bucky ratted on his two best friends – two innocent Japanese kids – to get his job with the LAPD. His mother died from drinking bad moonshine.

This is not your mother’s Sue Grafton novel. This is hopped up pistol whipping pimp shakedown negro wasting Los Angeles. The city’s a nightmare of brokedown and built up, and as Bucky and the other cops move between the scum and glitz they lose their cool and calm. Then the body of a girl is found near the corner of 39th and Norton – she’s been cut in half, organs removed, and tortured – and cops lose their minds.

The press plays up the case and the PD hunkers down to find out who did Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. Turns out Ms. Cut-in-half wasn’t much of a wall flower; she tricked and tossed and rubbed knees for cash, drinks and cigarettes. Bucky’s partner Lee gets hopped on speed to counter the horror of the dead girl, and it turns him into a near lunatic. Ellroy investigates smart angles and there are no short cuts in the book. Ellroy has fun with historical and made up names and gives a pretty good conclusion to a true life murder case that remains unsolved.

Walter Tevis’ published his first novel The Hustler in 1959. The film version that everyone knows came out two years later, and the surprise in the combination of narrative and film is that they are vastly different works of art and both are superb. In Tevis’ book we find a rather straight redemption story with Fast Eddie Felson as the protagonist who has to unlearn the smalltime hustler’s game. He wants the brass ring and needs to graft the traits and thoughts of a winner onto his brain. Assisting the education is the selfish character Bert who guides Eddie toward the brass while Eddie fights the lessons instilled by his former manager and flunky Charlie.

The book’s centerpiece, whereby Eddie receives the thunderbolt of epiphany, comes during a billiard game at the home of the swishy Kentuckian Findlay. The breakdown that Findlay suffers as the game progresses gives Eddie a glance into his own horrible meltdown against Minnesota Fats, which is the book’s first big showdown scene.

And then there’s the woman. In the film she’s Sarah Packard but in the book she’s just Sarah and she all but disappears when Fast Eddie breaks for Kentucky with Bert. At that point the book and film diverge and they both conclude admirably. It’s Eddie who emerges as the ferocious individual, replacing Bert and his cronies in their grownup schoolyard power games. The book is slightly ambiguous about Eddie’s signoff at the end, but only slightly. A reader knows Eddie’s got the upper hand imprinted in his psyche now, and he can use it wherever he finds the next big score.