A Body Without a Soul

I noticed a stuffed spaniel poised by the fireplace with a yellowed newspaper rolled into its mouth.  Madeline said, “That’s Balto. The paper is the LA Times for August 1, 1926. That’s the day Daddy learned he’d made his first million.  Balto was our pet then.  Daddy’s accountant called up and said, ‘Emmett, you’re a millionaire!’ Daddy was cleaning his pistols, and Balto came in with the paper.  Daddy wanted to consecrate the moment, so he shot him.”

Last week, Central Cinema showed (the movie version, obviously, of) LA Confidential.  It was good, as I remembered, but James Stockwell’s version of Dudley Smith didn’t really match my memory, so I decided to re-read it.  And as long as I was going to do that, I was going to fix another wrong…

This will shock some of you to the core, but when I first read James Ellroy’s major modern work (the LA Quartet and the first two books of the Underworld USA Trilogy), I did so backwards.  This was about 1996, and the internet and the web certainly existed at the time, and it was a marvelous thing already, but there was no Wikipedia, there was no Google.  There was AltaVista, and it was wonderful, but…it just wouldn’t have occured to me to ask it what order to read these books in, and if I had it wouldn’t have known.  And for whatever reason, they are not labeled or otherwise marketed as related to one another.

So, I’m reading the LA Quartet in order, and here we are at the beginning.

The title, “The Black Dahlia” refers to January 15 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, a real-life event.  Some of the background characters are also taken from real life, such as Mickey Cohen and the chief of police; the story itself is of course fiction, though, and the main characters are entirely invented.

Briefly, the book is about two ex-boxers turned cop, their love of a woman, partnership on the job, and obsession with the Dahlia case.

From here on be spoilers…

It seems to me the central organizing principle of the book is triangles, love and otherwise.

• Lee / Buck / Dahlia – Both the cops are obsessed with the murder to the point of destruction.  They both solve it, but neither are able to close the case.  Neither, of course, can protect the Dahlia.
• Lee / Buck / Kay – For most of the book, we think this is the healthiest and happiest of triangles; they all love one another in their own ways, they all protect one another.  Of course, by the end we learn that Lee turned Buck into a murderer to try to protect Kay from the fallout of his own history as a bank robber, that Key knew much that she never told Buck, and as for Buck…
• Buck / Kay / Dahlia – Kay could never really compete with the dead woman, although the ending leaves open the possibility that, the murder finally solved, Buck & Dahlia can live, if not happily ever after, at least together for a while longer.
• Madeline / Dahlia / Buck – where Madeline uses Buck’s Dahlia obsession for her own purposes.
• Madeline / Buck / Emmett – Madeline protects her daddy/true love by seducing and using Buck
• Emmett / Georgie / Ramona – Ramona cuckolds and further humiliates Emmett with Georgie; Georgie pays the price; this is the triangle that sets the whole sordid tale in motion
• Buck / Ramona / Martha – Buck lets the torturer Ramona get away clean to avoid hurting Martha even more than she’s already been damaged by a truly dysfunctional family
• Georgie / Ramona / Dahlia – finally, we learn the killing triangle.  Twisted Georgie and even more twisted Ramona rape, torture, kill and mutilate their daughter’s lover/lookalike
• Madeline / Buck / Lee – the only of these triangles the public ever finds out about, and the only one that isn’t real.  Madeline and Buck both claim it is, forcing Madeline to take some of the fall she deserves for murdering Lee, while protecting the rest of her family and the remnants of his career.

Thank goodness for happy endings.