“Of All the Gin Joints in All the Towns in All the World, She Walks Into Mine”

It was 75 years ago today that Casablanca, the classic film (and World War II propaganda picture) starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, had its world premiere in New York City. I’ve enjoyed that movie, oh, a dozen times or more over the years. But today seems like a good occasion for another re-watch, don’t you think?

Bullet Points: Day of the Dead Edition

• As Connecticut’s Harford Courant tells it, “The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award will be given to author Bill Beverly for his novel Dodgers later this month. The Mark Twain House & Museum announced the award, which comes with $25,000, on Wednesday evening. It is presented to an author whose book, published in the previous year, best embodies an ‘American voice’ such as Twain’s in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the museum said in a statement.” Beverly’s writing of Dodgers previously brought him the 2016 Gold Dagger award from Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association.

• How would you like to do your writing on Mickey Spillane’s old typewriter? Mystery Fanfare reports that the circa-1930 Royal Manual machine on which Mike Hammer’s creator may have labored “during his early days as a comic-book writer” will be among the items Heritage Auctions puts up for bids in New York City on March 7, 2018.

• The new German TV series Babylon Berlin, based on a pair (soon to be a trio) of 1920s-set crime novels by Volker Kutscher and featuring a Berlin police inspector named Gereon Rath, has been winning plenty of favorable press since it debuted in Germany on October 13. Kate Connolly of The Guardian writes: “A lavish 16-part TV series set between the two world wars is being tipped as the first big-budget German production that could become a global TV blockbuster. Babylon Berlin, a period drama set in the Weimar Republic replete with crime, corruption, sex and decadence, cost €38m (£33m) to make and is the most expensive TV series filmed in Germany. Critics are predicting it will compete with the likes of Breaking Bad, House of Cards and Downton Abbey.” The Killing Times shorthands the show’s plot thusly: “Set against the social and political upheaval of Germany in 1929—with a failing economy and a rise of right-wing extremists, some may even find timely parallels to events today—nothing is what it seems as the case spirals and Gereon’s life is changed forever.” An English-subtitled version of Babylon Berlin is scheduled to premiere in the UK on November 5 (courtesy of Sky Atlantic), and Netflix has purchased U.S. broadcast rights (though it hasn’t also announced when Americans might be able to watch it). Sky’s trailer for the program is embedded below; a German trailer can be enjoyed here.



For more information, check out the Babylon Berlin Web site.

• “SundanceTV has partnered with Emmy-winning producer and director Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost),” states Criminal Element, “to bring you Cold Blooded, a two-part documentary detailing the murder case that [Truman] Capote made famous [in his 1966 book, In Cold Blood]. The documentary will ‘recount the Clutter murders in detail, using previously unpublished documents, in addition to first-hand accounts from the Clutters’ living relatives’ to provide new insight into this groundbreaking case. Part One premieres on SundanceTV on Saturday, November 18, at 9 p.m. ET.”

• Congratulations to author Duane Swierczynski (Canary, Revolver), whose series pilot adaptation of Dan Simmons’ 2000 novel, Darwin’s Blade—co-written with Chris Morgan (Fast & Furious)—has been sold to NBC-TV. The plot, says Deadline Hollywood, “centers on Darwin ‘Dar’ Minor, a brilliant yet arrogant accident-reconstruction specialist who consults police on the bizarre cases no one else can solve.” Swierczynski is set to co-executive produce the show, as well.

• It had been so long since I last heard anything about director Martin Scorsese’s plans to collaborate with actor Leonard DiCaprio on a big-screen adaptation of Erik Larson’s 2003 non-fiction book, The Devil in the White City, that I’d nearly lost hope of the project’s viability. However, Scorsese told the Toronto Sun late last year that “there is a script being worked on” (purportedly by Hunger Games writer Billy Ray), and on Halloween, the BookBub Blog brought us up to date (as much as possible) on where things stand with that picture. Unfortunately, there’s still no estimate of when this sixth Scorsese-DiCaprio venture might be released.

• I wasn’t a fan of the original S.W.A.T. (see it’s opening title sequence here), so there’s scant chance of my being interested in the revival of that 1975-1976 crime drama. However, the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Lloyd insists the new show, debuting tonight on CBS, isn’t without its attractions. “Essentially a militarized police procedural, or perhaps a domesticated military drama,” he explains, S.W.A.T. offers “sexy hardware and specialized jargon,” plus “plenty of action to distract you.” Lloyd says that “With its characters at once thin and broad; its L.A. backdrop; and its mix of existential philosophizing, social commentary and corny representations of hot-button issues, S.W.A.T. also recalls and has some of the appeal of Jack Webb’s classic Dragnet, but with a more progressive outlook and a sprinkling of sex scenes.” Watch a trailer for the series here.

• This, though, does sound worth watching. From Slate:

Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in late April with sickening timing. Donald Trump’s presidency hung over Margaret Atwood’s novel, set in a dystopic, misogynist, theocratic near future, making it feel less like fiction than a terrifying prophecy. This Friday, Netflix debuts Alias Grace, another Atwood adaptation that is dreadfully apropos. The 1996 novel is historical fiction, based on an 1843 true crime, in which 16-year-old Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant to Canada, was convicted of murdering her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his pregnant housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. But Harvey Weinstein, our pussy-grabbing president, and their ilk loom over Alias Grace; indeed, they seem as though they could be characters in Alias Grace, where men misuse women as if it were their right.

• The November edition of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots features notes about everything from Lee Child’s latest novel and plans to erect (in north Oxford, England) a statue honoring the late Colin Dexter to the phenomenally prolific James Swallow, the persistently underappreciated works of James Hadley Chase, and new or forthcoming books by Laura Wilson, Håkan Nesser, and Malcolm Mackay. It’s all here.

• Janet Rudolph lets us know that the latest edition of her quarterly magazine, Mystery Readers Journal, is now available. The issue’s theme is Big City Cops, and the contents include this essay by Rennie Airth (The Death of Kings) about the difficulties he faced in shaping his historical British detectives.

• Happy 11th “blogiversary” to Double O Section!

• Speaking of anniversaries, Kevin Burton Smith writes in his blog: “It was 20 years ago today that I uploaded a tentative few pages of what became The Thrilling Detective Web Site, for a pal to see. That pal, Peter Walker, seemed to like it, so I invited a few more friends on Rara-Avis, the old hard-boiled list serv, to check it out. Encouraged by their response, I scrambled to make it more presentable, and I officially released the site to the big bad world on April 1, 1998, trying (and inevitably failing) to keep up with the ever-expanding world of private-eye fiction—past, present, and future.” Smith’s frequently updated site is now an essential resource for folks, like me, who wish to learn more about the last century’s worth of American crime fiction. Good for you, Kevin, for achieving this milestone!

• It seems that Roy Price, the chief of Amazon’s video division and the grandson of legendary TV producer-writer Roy Huggins (77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, The Rockford Files, etc.), recently found himself ensnared in the web of sexual-harassment scandals that have also claimed Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein, producer-director Brett Ratner, screenwriter James Toback, celebrity chef John Besh, TV star Jeremy Piven, journalists Michael Oreskes and Mark Halperin, amateur politician Donald Trump, and so many other high-profile American men. As The New York Times revealed, the 50-year-old Price, “who was in charge of Amazon’s efforts to create original movies and television shows,” resigned from Amazon Studios—which he’d helped launch in 2012—“just days after a producer publicly accused him of sexual harassment.” The Washington Post said the move followed accusations from Isa Dick Hackett, an executive producer of Amazon’s popular The Man in the High Castle and the daughter of Philip K. Dick (whose 1962 novel of that same name inspired the series), that Price “made unwanted sexual remarks” and repeatedly propositioned her in 2015. As if all of that weren’t bad enough, Wikipedia explains that in the wake of Hackett’s allegations, “Price’s fiancée, Lila Feinberg, announced that she was calling off their wedding. Her dress was reportedly designed by Georgina Chapman, the wife of Harvey Weinstein …”

(Left) Ex-Amazon executive Roy Price

• Actor Kevin Spacey faces his own charges of inappropriate sexual behavior. According to The Huffington Post, the TV streaming service Netflix “has suspended production on the sixth and final season of House of Cards”—in which Spacey plays Machiavellian and murderous politician Frank Underwood—amid allegations dating back to 1986. It was in that year, says fellow performer Anthony Rapp (now appearing in Star Trek: Discovery), that Spacey made “unwanted sexual advances” on him during a party. At the time, Rapp was 14 years old, while Spacey was in his late 20s. Deadline notes that Spacey has “issued a statement on social media saying he ‘did not remember the encounter’ but added he was ‘horrified’ by what Rapp described. … The Oscar-winning Spacey also used the occasion to announce publicly that chose now to ‘to live as a gay man,’ a move that drew harsh rebukes swiftly online and otherwise.” There’s no telling how this controversy will shake out, but at least for now, the 13-episode sixth season of House of Cards is being readied for broadcast on Netflix in mid-2018.

• Ontario author Linwood Barclay talks with Criminal Element about his new novel, Parting Shot, “a standalone thriller that revisits both the backdrop of Promise Falls”—where his recent trilogy (Broken Promise, Far From True, and The Twenty-Three) was set—and that trilogy’s protagonist, private investigator Cal Weaver. Meanwhile, the movie Never Saw It Coming, based on Barclay’s “dark comic thriller” of the same name and shot from a screenplay by the author, will premiere on December 1 at the Whistler Film Festival in British Columbia.

• Nancie Clare’s latest guest on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast is Clea Simon, talking about her new novel, World Enough, which finds “former music journalist Tara Winton revisit[ing] her mid-1980s beat—Boston’s punk rock club scene—in the wake of the apparently accidental death of one of the scene’s prominent musicians.”

• And in The Thrill Begins, Joe Clifford chats with Danny Gardner, whose distinctive, 1950s-set debut novel, A Negro and an Ofay (Down & Out), reached stores this last spring.

• One of the novels I’ve looked forward to picking up this season is Chris Brookmyre’s science fiction/mystery crossover, Places in the Darkness, which is due out early next week from publisher Orbit. So I was pleased to see this interview with the author in Crime Fiction Lover, which includes his description of the book’s plot line:

It is a thriller in the tradition of the great Shane Black movies like Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: a story about two mismatched investigators forced to work together, though unlike in Shane’s scripts, my
protagonists are both women. The whole thing takes place aboard the Ciudad de Cielo, a space station where 300,000 people live and work developing what would be the Earth’s first interstellar craft. It is a place where ambitious scientists and engineers go to work on cutting-edge technology, but also where many people go to escape the things that went wrong in their lives back on Earth. The city’s private police force, the Seguridad, boasts that there has never been a murder aboard (though they do have a liberal interpretation of what constitutes an accidental death), but that changes when a dismembered body is found floating in zero-gravity.

• R.I.P., Donald Bain, described by The New York Times as “the pseudonymous author of the Murder, She Wrote novels, Margaret Truman’s ‘Capital Crimes’ mysteries and Coffee, Tea or Me? (1967), the supposed memoir of two saucy airline stewardesses.” A onetime airline publicist himself, Bain evidently died from congestive heart failure on Saturday, October 21, in White Plains, New York. Beyond the previously mentioned books, The Gumshoe Site notes that Bain “authored, under the house-name J.D. Hardin, a number of soft-pornographic Western action [novels] featuring Doc Weatherbee, a Pinkerton op, and ghosted Sado Cop (Playboy, 1976) for Nick Vasile, a former undercover cop. A few of his other pseudonyms are Donna Bain, Mike Lundy, Stephanie Blake, and Pamela South. He finally wrote his own mystery thriller, Lights Out! (Severn House), in 2014. His forthcoming books are Allied in Danger, a Capital Crimes novel (Forge, 2018), and A Date with Murder, a Murder She Wrote novel (co-written with Jon Land; Berkley, 2018).” Wikipedia says Bain penned “over 115 books in his 40-year career.” Click here to read John Valeri’s fond “personal remembrance” of Bain in Criminal Element.

• Gone, as well, is Jack Bannon, who’s probably best known for the five seasons he spent playing a dapper assistant newspaper city editor, Art Donovan, on the Emmy Award-winning CBS-TV drama Lou Grant (1977-1982). He passed away on October 22 at 77 years of age. The Hollywood Reporter explains that “Bannon's parents were actors. His mother, Bea Benaderet, received two Emmy nominations for her work on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, portrayed Kate Bradley on Petticoat Junction and Green Acres, and was the voice of Betty Rubble on [the cartoon series] The Flintstones. His father, Jim Bannon, played the cowboy Red Ryder in four 1940s movies.” Jack Bannon’s acting credits include appearances on The Felony Squad, Judd, for the Defense, Mannix, The Rockford Files, Remington Steele, Moonlighting, and the 1987 teleflick Perry Mason: The Case of the Sinister Spirit. The Hollywood Reporter adds that Bannon died in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he had “lived … with his wife, actress Ellen Travolta—the older sister of John Travolta—since 1995.”

• Finally, since today marks the end of 2017’s Dia de los Muetros (or Day of the Dead) festival, be sure to check out Mystery Fanfare’s list of crime and mystery novels associated with this occasion.

From the Field

• Florida thriller writer Lisa Unger has come up with a way to raise money for Hurricane Irma victims in South Florida, Texas’ Houston area, and the beleaguered island of Puerto Rico. According to the Tampa Bay Times, she has collected “14 new, signed hardcover books by some of the top crime-fiction writers in the world,” and is offering them to readers through a simple drawing. To enter, one must only donate at least $10 to one of three aid organizations she specifies, and then e-mail her your contribution receipt. The books up for grabs in this contest include Ace Atkins’ The Fallen, Lisa Gardner's Right Behind You, Harlan Coben’s Don’t Let Go, Lori Roy’s Let Me Die in His Footsteps, and Michael Connelly's The Late Show. Donations must be made by this coming Monday, October 2. Unger will announce the winner the next day. (Hat tip to Craig Pittman.)

• Sadly, this coming Saturday, September 30, will be the final day of business for Seattle Mystery Bookshop, which has been a prominent feature of downtown Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district for the last 27 years. There’s more to read about the closure here.

• Also coming to an end this week is the latest annual “Classics in September” series produced by the British blog Crime Fiction Lover. Click here to find all of the posts related to that month-long celebration. Among my favorite entries this year were Marina Sofia’s tribute to novelist Margaret Millar (the wife of Ross Macdonald), a fond recollection of Daniel Woodrell’s Tomato Red (1998), and Purity Brown’s salute to Desmond Bagley’s crime novels (among them, The Golden Keel and Running Blind). Until next year, then …

• From In Reference to Murder:

The Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., … is getting a trove of cool artifacts from the world’s largest private collection of spycraft—more than 5,000 of them, to be specific: everything from a portion of the spy plane flown by pilot Gary Powers that was shot down over Russia, to the axe used to hack exiled Soviet communist Leon Trotsky to death, to a 13-foot-long spy submarine from World War II.

The Smithsonian magazine Web site reports that these numerous artifacts “will go on display when the museum moves to its new, larger location at L’Enfant Plaza in fall 2018.”

• Author-blogger Sandra Seamans brings word that “The 2018 Minotaur Books/Malice Domestic Novel Competition is open for submissions. They are seeking traditional mysteries of 65,000 words (minimum). The deadline is January 12, 2018. There is no entry fee. The winner receives a $10,000 advance against royalties. You can find the details here. Scroll the page. I know it says 2017 but the entry form is for the 2018 competition. This only open to authors who have never had a novel published before.”

• The President Is Missing, a June 2018 release co-authored by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and best-seller James Patterson, has already been acquired by Showtime television for adaptation as a series. New York magazine’s Vulture site says, “No writers or producers are attached at this point, let alone a creator/showrunner. Showtime also didn’t say whether the project will be a multi-year series or a one-season limited series à la Twin Peaks: The Return. Not much is known about the plot of the book, with a press release describing the Alfred A. Knopf and Little, Brown and Company joint release as a ‘gripping tale of power and betrayal, with a unique perspective on the pressures and stakes faced by a sitting president.’” Stay tuned.

• Congratulations to Ah Sweet Mystery Blog for reaching its second birthday. It’s not easy to start or maintain a vital, interesting crime fiction-oriented blog, and I feel compelled to salute anyone willing to stick with the task for the long-haul.

• And Mystery Fanfare alerts us to two soon-forthcoming California celebrations: Orange County’s Ladies of Intrigue Conference (October 1) and Mystery Week (October 14-20), which has scheduled events at a variety of venues throughout the San Francisco Bay area.

Search for Identity

Here’s an occasion I surely would have forgotten, had it not been for this note on the Web site Television Obscurities:

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Coronet Blue. The short-lived CBS drama premiered on May 29th, 1967—nearly two years after it went into production. Frank Converse starred as an amnesiac searching for his identity. The only thing he can remember is the phrase “coronet blue,” but he doesn’t know what it means. Taking the name Michael Alden, the man embarks on a journey filled with danger and intrigue.

You can learn much more about this show by clicking here. The opening title sequence from Coronet Blue can be enjoyed here.

By the way, actor Frank Converse—who would go on from Coronet Blue to co-star with Jack Warden in N.Y.P.D. (1967-1969) and then with Claude Akins in the 1974-1976 trucker drama Movin’ On—just celebrated his 79th birthday on May 22.

READ MORE: “Sixties Spy Show Coronet Blue Coming to DVD at Last,” by Matthew Bradford, aka Tanner (Double O Section).

A Conflict Lives on in Fiction

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered program noted this afternoon that “The U.S. entered [World War I] a century ago, on April 6, 1917, nearly three years after [fighting] erupted in Europe during the summer of 1914. The Americans made quite a splash, turning a stalemate in favor of their British and French allies.” This provides an excellent occasion to remind readers of a piece I put together for Kirkus Reviews three years ago, looking back at the so-called Great War’s continuing impact on crime and mystery fiction.

Also worth listening to on All Things Considered today was this story about the 1918 lynching of a German immigrant in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. It struck a personal chord. My maternal grandfather, who was born in Canada but fought with the British Army during World War I, before moving to the United States, used to tell me how even after the war’s end, he kept secret the fact that his mother was German. She’d married his father, a tailor in Great Britain, before heading across the Atlantic in the very late 19th century.

Bloch Party

Today marks 100 years since the birth, on April 5, 1917, of Robert Bloch, the American novelist and inveterate punster remembered for penning The Scarf (1947), The Will to Kill (1954), Psycho (1959), Star Stalker (1968), and further works of crime, suspense, and science fiction. To commemorate this occasion, bloggers across the Web have been paying tribute all week to his more than half-century-long career. Todd Mason offers his own and other fine retrospectives on Bloch’s literary efforts, with additional salutes coming from Jerry House, James Reasoner, Patti Abbott, and Bill Crider (here and here). You have your work cut out for you, if you hope to read this wide range of articles, so you’d better get started right away.

Black Dahlia: Long Legend of a Short Life

Elizabeth Short shown at age 19 in a police photo, taken in 1943 after she was arrested in Santa Barbara, California, for underage drinking—her first time living in Southern California.

She is more recognizable than any of Jack the Ripper’s victims, mostly because she was murdered at a time—after the Second World War, rather than in the late 1880s—when photography was far more advanced, but also because there are shots of what she looked like (smiling, no less) before her days were so cruelly ended. Although there was early gossip about her being in the escort business, it was wrong. Instead, she tried to make ends meet as a waitress, and like so many young women of her era, was said to dream of an acting career. She spent most of her life in Massachusetts (where she was born) or in Florida, and had been making her home in Los Angeles, California, for only about six months prior to her infamous slaying.

She was 22 years old, 5 feet 5 inches tall, with dark hair, blue eyes, and bad teeth. Her name was Elizabeth Short, but she’s best remembered as “The Black Dahlia.”

It was in the mid-morning of January 15, 1947—70 years ago today—that Betty Bersinger, a resident of the Leimert Park neighborhood, in south L.A., took a stroll outside with her 3-year-old daughter, only to happen across what she at first assumed must be a discarded mannequin tossed into a nearby vacant lot. Instead, it was Short’s corpse, naked and severed in twain at the waist, and drained of blood. The murderer had not only removed her intestines, but had slashed her mouth from ear to ear in a “Glasgow smile.”

The horrific, misogynistic nature of this crime, coupled with the victim’s attractiveness, drew widespread attention. While newspapers spared no ink on their shocking headlines (“Young L.A. Girl Slain; Body Slashed in Two”), police sought to identify the deceased and determine where she had most recently been seen, and by whom. Her fingerprints were matched to a set taken from Short back in 1943, when—during an earlier stay in Southern California—she was arrested for underage drinking. And police learned that she’d been missing since January 9, after last being seen in the lobby of downtown L.A.’s grand Biltmore Hotel. It wasn’t long before newspapers began fielding phone calls from people claiming to have information about Short or her killer, or to have murdered her themselves. As a true-crime Web site called The Lineup recalls,

Witnesses who had supposedly seen Short during her missing week were, one by one, questioned and dismissed by investigators, who determined they were either outright lying or had mistaken Short for another woman.

Some 60 people came forward and confessed to the crime. Of these, 25 were seriously considered by the LAPD. Many of the suspects were household names, including Fred Sexton, the artist who created the Maltese Falcon prop in the iconic movie of the same name; Norman Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times; [and] Jewish mobster Bugsy Siegel …

Time magazine explained in a 2015 retrospective that “One promising admission came a few weeks after the murder, from an Army corporal who said he had been drinking with Short in San Francisco a few days before her body was discovered—then blacked out, with no memory of his activity until he came to again in a cab outside New York’s Penn Station. … Asked if he thought he had committed the murder, the corporal said yes, and became a prime suspect until evidence emerged that he had actually been on his military base the day of Short’s death.” That tippling serviceman, Joseph A. Dumais, was among dozens of people, men and women both, who’ve confessed over the decades to doing in Betty Short, though the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office deemed fewer than half that number to be viable suspects. One of the latter was George H. Hodel, a physician who died in 1999—four years before his own son, then-retired L.A. homicide detective Steve Hodel, claimed in Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder that his father was definitely Short’s slayer. (This 2004 episode of CBS-TV’s 48 Hours Mystery examines Hodel’s assertions.) Doubts as to the veracity of that charge have been raised, however, and the Black Dahlia case remains open to this day.

(Left) Mia Kirshner as Short in The Black Dahlia.

From the first, the nickname that came to be associated with Short’s liquidation—“The Black Dahlia,” which was a press concoction, or perhaps referred to the victim’s fondness for black attire, or was “a play on the then-current film The Blue Dahlia”—was guaranteed to draw public notice and incite macabre curiosity. That the killer was never identified or caught (just as with London’s Ripper) helped extend the notoriety of this case well past the lifetimes of its suspects and investigators. Fiction writers have long dined on the mysteries surrounding Betty Short’s gruesome demise. In 1962, Theodora Keogh—a granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt—published The Other Girl, which imagined Short engaging in an orgy and becoming the focus of sexual jealousy before finally losing her life. A fairly well-conceived 1975 NBC-TV film, Who Is the Black Dahlia? starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., with Lucie Arnaz playing Short, was followed by John Gregory Dunne’s Dahlia-inspired True Confessions (1977). The most popular retelling of this story, with lurid embellishments, is certainly James Ellroy’s 1987 novel, The Black Dahlia, though Max Allan Collins’ 2001 yarn, Angel in Black (which finds his series gumshoe, Nate Heller, a bit too deeply involved with Miss Short and the circumstances of her murder), provides no fewer twists and bizarre turns. Angel in Black would make a good movie someday. Let’s hope, though, that if one is ever made, it’s superior to director Brian De Palma’s 2006 big-screen adaptation of Ellroy’s tale, which proved confusing even to viewers who’d read the book and were well-steeped in the facts surrounding the Dahlia inquiry.

It’s impossible now to look back at Elizabeth Short’s photos and not wonder what might have become of that young woman had her life not been terminated in violence and sensationalism. Seventy years on, her death and dismemberment are no less shocking than they were for Californians still trying to shed the fears brought on by World War II. Had she lived to see birthdays past her 22nd, might Short have eventually become the cinematic figure she hoped one day to be—a bit player, a character actress, or maybe a genuine star? Or was her path into the history books destined to be marked by torment and mutilation at the hands of an unknown party or parties? Like so many questions in this story, that one too is left unanswered.

READ MORE: “The Black Dahlia: Los Angeles’ Most Famous Unsolved Murder,” by James Bartlett (BBC News); “After 70 Years, the Black Dahlia Murder Still Haunts Los Angeles,” by Layla Halabian (LAist); “Nearly 70 Years After Her Murder, Here Are the Things We Still Don’t Know About Black Dahlia,” by Keri Blakinger (New York Daily News); “The Murder of the Black Dahlia: The Ultimate Cold Case,” by Stephen Karadjis (Crime Magazine); “I Never Knew Her in Life: The Black Dahlia Case in Popular Culture,” by Steven Powell (The Venetian Vase); “A Slaying Cloaked in Mystery and Myths,” by Larry Harnish (Los Angeles Times); “The Spot Where the Black Dahlia’s Body Was Found” (IAmNotaStalker.com); The Black Dahlia in Hollywood.