Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Film

Hooked on crime

For James Ellroy, whose book The Black Dahlia has been transformed into a new film, real-life murder and law-breaking inform his fiction.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published September 14, 2006

	[Universal Studios]
	James Ellroy dedicated The Black Dahlia to his mother. But he says he wrote it not as therapy, but because he “wanted to write a great book.”
	The movie is based on the novel The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, who also wrote the novel L.A. Confidential.
	Director loses sight of 'Dahlia' In his new film, Brian DePalma spends too much time on everyone else, and the audience suffers.

Two murdered women helped make James Ellroy one of the best contemporary crime novelists.

One was the Black Dahlia. The other was his mother.

Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia, about the most notorious unsolved murder in California history, is the source of director Brian De Palma's new film of the same name, which opens Friday.

It's just one of Ellroy's 16 books - novels, short story and nonfiction collections, a memoir - but one that lies close to what turned a self-destructive young criminal into a literary master.

"My mother's death got me hooked on crime," Ellroy says. "Seven months later I read about the Black Dahlia, and that was it."

Ellroy's characters, cops and criminals alike, tend to be rage-driven, violent and profane. The author, speaking on the phone from a New York hotel just before leaving for the movie's premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Aug. 30, sounds nothing like his fictional tough guys.

Well-spoken, articulate and polite, Ellroy says he is resigned to another round of questions about the emotional echoes between the two women's deaths, which he calls "the central myth of my life."

"I'm anxious to get through the book tour for a reissue of the novel and the movie and then never discuss this thing again."

He was 10 years old, a child of divorce born in postwar Los Angeles, when his mother, Geneva Hilliker, went on a date one Saturday night.

Her body was found discarded on a roadside. She had been raped and strangled. Her killer was never found.

That was in 1958. Eleven years before, a 22-year-old would-be actor named Elizabeth Short had been found on another L.A. roadside. But her murder, unlike Hilliker's, turned into a media monster.

Short's grotesquely bisected and mutilated corpse, her mysterious recent past, her tenuous connection to show business, a nation poised tensely on the brink of the Cold War: All conspired to turn an anonymous young woman from Medford, Mass., into the exotic Black Dahlia.

Squadrons of investigators were assigned, dozens of people confessed, thousands of theories were expounded, oceans of ink were spilled, and in the end Short's murder went unsolved.

For Ellroy, it became an obsession as his life broke down around him. After his mother's death, he sometimes lived on the street, abused a wide range of substances, broke into houses, got into fights, did jail time.

In his late 20s, he sobered up and taught himself to write. His first novel, Brown's Requiem, was published in 1981, and he immediately left Los Angeles.

But Ellroy kept writing about the city, building a reputation on brutally lyrical noir novels such as The Big Nowhere, Suicide Hill and L.A. Confidential. The last was made into a film in 1997, winning two Oscars.

The Black Dahlia was his seventh novel. He wanted to develop his skills as a writer before he tackled the story that had haunted him for so long.

Although his fictional version of the story solves the murder, he says of various claims about who really killed Short, "It's unprovable. And I don't care."

He dedicated The Black Dahlia to his mother. "It wasn't therapy. I wanted to write a great book."

Ellroy says he worked with writer-director Curtis Hanson on the film version of L.A. Confidential, but he had little involvement with translating The Black Dahlia to the screen. "I had a cordial lunch with Brian De Palma. I spent a little time on the set."

But he says he's satisfied with both films. They're simply not the same as his books.

"You lose the interior monologue. You lose inner access to the characters. And I understand that you simply have to let this go.

"What you get is a well-designed, good-looking visual record that tells your story."

Ellroy recently moved back to Los Angeles after several decades of living in other cities. He's writing the last volume in his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. The first two, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, revolve around a welter of conspiracies, including the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and connections among the FBI, CIA, Mafia, Howard Hughes, Fidel Castro and more.

"I like to live in the big moments of history, in the private infrastructure of public events," Ellroy says. "I'm going back in time to rewrite history to my specifications."

But he doesn't read anyone else's version, he says. "I don't read at all. I don't watch TV. Movies, no.

"I lie in the dark and think."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 13, 2006, 13:02:33]