Still a Source of Macabre Curiosity

It was 72 years ago today, on January 15, 1947, that the victim of one of the most notorious unsolved murders in the long history of Los Angeles, California, was discovered. She was a 22-year-old New England-born waitress, Elizabeth Short, who is best remembered by a nickname of disputed provenance: the Black Dahlia.

I wrote about her slaying and the subsequent decades of its mythologizing two years ago on this page, in association with the 70th anniversary of the crime. More recently, though, retired Los Angeles Times reporter Larry Harnisch has been revisiting Short’s case and the all-too-frequently flawed record of its details in his L.A. history blog, The Daily Mirror. Here, for instance, Harnisch cites “five obvious errors” made by modern writers attempting to recall that case. In two other posts—here and here—he considers the question, “Are There Any Good Books on the Black Dahlia Case?” His conclusion: “No. But there are a lot of really, really bad ones and you should avoid them all or you will just have to unlearn everything. And your head may explode from all the nonsense.” Meanwhile, in a couple of other blog posts—accessible here and here—Harnisch considers a parallel query: “Are There Any Good Black Dahlia Sites on the Internet?” Again, it’s probably best to lower your expectations. And in this post, Harnisch debunks talk of Short having met her death at the hands of physician George H. Hodel, a theory promulgated by Hodel’s own son, Steve, in his 2003 book, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder.

Harnisch is said to be working on his own history of the Black Dahlia. We can only to see it before too much more time has passed.

READ MORE: “January 15, 1947: A Werewolf on the Loose,” by Joan Renner (Deranged L.A. Crimes); “Black Dahlia: Common Myths About the Black Dahlia and Their Origins,” by Larry Harnisch (The Daily Mirror); “Black Dahlia: Complete Guide on Elizabeth Short, Related Books and Movies” (Mystery Tribune).

Welcome to the Dahlia House?

After reading historian Larry Harnish’s debunkings of the theory that Los Angeles physician George Hodel was responsible for the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, I’m quite skeptical of Hodel’s guilt in that never-solved crime.

Still, I was interested to read in January Magazine that the famous Sowden House—where Hodel lived in the latter half of the 1940s, and which has been postulated as the site of Short’s slaying (her body was supposedly transported from there to a vacant lot in south L.A.)—“recently sold for $4.7 million.” Quoting from a piece in Britain’s Daily Mail, January explains that “The home has now been bought by Dan Goldfarb, founder of Canna-Pet, which makes non-psychoactive cannabis supplements for animals. He told the L.A. Times he plans to make the property into a ‘cannabis oasis.’”

READ MORE: “The Sordid and Possibly Murderous Secrets of Los Angeles’ Sowden House,” by Hadley Meares (Curbed Los Angeles).

A Hasty News Break

The last couple of weeks have been so busy here at The Rap Sheet, I haven’t had a chance to put together any of my signature “Bullet Points” news briefings. I am still pretty jammed up with work, but I want to mention at least a few things of interest.

• Not everyone remembers this, but the first big-screen adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon, was made in 1931—10 years before the better-known version starring Humphrey Bogart as San Francisco private investigator Sam Spade. “This first adaptation,” writes Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis, “as I’ve just discovered, follows the story line of the book just about as closely as the Bogart one. In my opinion, though, while very good, if not excellent, it isn’t nearly as good as the later one, in spite of the semi-risque bits it gets away with, having been made before the Movie Code [went] into effect. (I suspect that I’m not saying anything new here.)

• Speaking of Falcon, the blog Down These Mean Streets has posted an abbreviated, but nonetheless dramatic, 1946 radio adaptation of that tale, starring Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet.

• The latest update of Kevin Burton Smith’s The Thrilling Detective Web Site is now available for your perusal. Among the subjects of its new or updated files: TV Guide’s private eye covers; Mitch Roberts, “one of the best P.I. series you never heard of”; Ray Bradbury’s Elmo Crumley novels; Brian Vaughan’s Patrick “P.I.” Immelmann comic books; and a catalogue of “Private Eyes Who Won’t Stay Dead.”

• Apparently, Larry Harnisch, the historian and retired Los Angeles Times copy editor who has been quite critical of Piu Eatwell’s latest work, Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America’s Greatest Unsolved Murder, has been laboring since 1997 on his own book about the 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short, the waitress and would-be starlet best remembered as “The Black Dahlia.” He writes this week in his blog, The Daily Mirror:

To those who might ask “Is there really anything left to research after 21 years?” the answer is “absolutely.”

Since 1996, the doors have swung open on many resources that were restricted or unknown when I began. Not long ago, I received material that would have required a court order to obtain in the 1990s, or so I was told at the time. Some questions can only be answered with painstaking research and analysis at the molecular level. A few months ago, I spent the better part of a week building a spreadsheet from the FBI’s uniform crime reports from 1940 to 1949 to determine Los Angeles’ ranking among the deadliest American cities. All for one or two sentences—an amazing amount of work that will invisible to readers.

I, for one, look forward to reading Harnisch’s completed text—whenever it’s finally published.

• Phoef Sutton (Colorado Boulevard) is Nancie Clare’s latest guest on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast. Listen to that show here.

• As we near the close of 2017, there are still more “best books of the year” posts popping up around the Web. Sons of Spade blogger Jochem Vandersteen has chosen his favorite P.I. novels of the last 12 months. Benoit Lelievre names his “top 10 favorite reads of the year” in Dead End Follies. Scottsdale, Arizona’s renowned Poisoned Pen Bookstore recently asked a number of well-known crime- and mystery-fiction authors to identify the best crime novels they’ve tackled since January 2017; the results of that survey can be found here. Crime Fiction Lover singles out its “Top 10 Nordic Noir Novels of 2017.” Literary Hub offers up a rundown of the best-reviewed mystery and crime novels of the year. If you’re curious to know Crimespree editor Jon Jordan’s five preferred crime novels, click here. And David Nemeth, after declaring that “best lists are bunk,” then proceeds to list his own idiosyncratic picks in Unlawful Acts.

• And sad to say, the group blog Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room will be shutting down at the end of this month after a decade in the business. I don’t see any mention of whether the site will remain online in archive status … but I also have not heard it’s disappearing in 2018, either. Hope for the best.

Bullet Points: Revivals and Retreads Edition

• It has now been just over 12 years since crime-fictionist Dennis Lynds died. I was reminded of this by a note in Mystery*File from his widow, thriller writer Gayle Lynds, who explains that her husband’s best-remembered protagonist, one-armed New York City gumshoe Dan Fortune, has recently been resurrected in print. She writes: “The entire 17-book series of private eye novels”—which Lynds published under his pseudonym Michael Collins—“are available again, for the first time in Kindle and trade paperback. We hope a new generation of readers will discover Dan, and that longtime fans will enjoy re-reading the classic tales.” Click here to find Amazon’s list of these reprinted works, from Act of Fear (1967) to Cassandra in Red (1993).

• Coincidentally, TracyK recently reviewed The Nightrunners—a Fortune yarn originally released in 1978—in her blog Bitter Tea and Mystery. She applauded the fact that it contains “twists and turns I did not anticipate” and that “there is less action and gun play, and more emphasis on brains and persistence” than she’d expected.

• A little behind schedule, but welcome nonetheless. The last I heard, Spinetingler Magazine was planning to release “its first [print] issue in years” sometime this month. Today, however, a news release reached my e-mailbox, saying that Down & Out Books expects to publish the Fall 2017 edition of Spinetingler in November. Its contents will include “original stories by Tracy Falenwolfe, Karen Montin, Jennifer Soosar, B.V. Lawson, Nick Kolakowski, David Rachels, and more. There are author snapshots of Con Lehane, Rusty Barnes, Mindy Tarquini, and others. Book features and reviews fill out the magazine’s pages.” There’s no word yet on ordering this new issue.

• In June, I drew your attention to the first trailer for The Alienist, TNT-TV’s historical mini-series based on Caleb Carr’s 1994 psychological thriller of that same name. ScreenRant has now posted a second trailer (which is also embedded below), and finally shares a date for the debut of that program: Monday, January 22, 2018. It also suggests that there will be eight episodes, rather than the previously mentioned 10, all written by True Detective director Cary Fukunaga and starring Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning as “19th-century investigators on the trail of a serial killer.” Hmm. With three months to go until this mini-series begins airing, I might actually find free time enough to re-read Carr’s book.



• A British blog called The Killing Times brings word that Bron Studios, a Canadian production company, plans to build a new TV series around Louise Rick, the Copenhagen detective inspector who features in more than half a dozen novels from Danish writer Sara Blædel. “Deadline reports that the first Louise Rick story, The Forgotten Girls, will serve [as] the basis for Season One,” but Bron “has optioned the whole series,” according to The Killing Times.

• Variety carries the unexpected news that actor John Turturro (The Night Of) has been signed to play 14th-century Franciscan friar-cum-sleuth William of Baskerville in a “high-end TV adaptation” of Umberto Eco’s 1980 mystery novel, The Name of the Rose. The eight-episode English-language production will be produced by Italy’s Matteo Levi and Carlo Degli Esposti, and is set to start shooting in January at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. In addition to the hangdog-faced Turturro, this mini-series will feature English performer Rupert Everett as the monk’s antagonist, Italian inquisitor Bernard Gui. An excellent 1986 film interpretation of Eco’s debut novel starred Sean Connery and F. Murray Abraham, and it’s hard to imagine that an extended remake is really needed. But of course, nobody asked me …

• … Just as no one solicited my opinion on whether the world requires a new version of Tom Selleck’s 1980-1988 private-eye TV series, Magnum, P.I. It seems screenwriters Peter Lenkov and Eric Guggenheim—the guys behind the disappointing current Hawaii Five-0 reboot and the latest version of MacGyver—think we need Magnum back, and have convinced CBS (the series’ original home network) to at least bankroll a pilot. The Hollywood Reporter describes the prospective series as an update of Selleck’s show.

It follows Thomas Magnum …, a decorated ex-Navy SEAL (also like the original) who, upon returning home from Afghanistan, repurposes his military skills to become a private investigator. With help from fellow vets Theodore “T.C.” Calvin and Orville “Rick” Wright, as well as that of disavowed former MI6 agent Juliet Higgins, Magnum takes on the cases no one else will, helping those who have no one else to turn to. Action, adventure and comedy aside, Magnum P.I. will also explore a brotherhood forged by the trauma of combat, what it means to return home an ex-soldier, and a commitment to continuing to serve while in the private sector.

This is the third time I remembering hearing that a Magnum comeback was on the drawing boards. The first was back in 2006, when Ben Affleck was set to star. Then, just last year, news broke that actress Eva Longoria had pitched a sequel that would have refocused the crime drama on “Magnum’s daughter, Lily ‘Tommy’ Magnum, who returns to Hawaii to take up the mantle of her father’s P.I. firm.” Neither of those efforts resulted in an actual show. Maybe we’ll be just as lucky this time around. Has Hollywood considered that not every once-popular series needs to be remade?

• Oh, and as In Reference to Murder relates,

A “Nancy Drew” TV series is once again in the works, with NBC developing a new series based on the iconic novel series after CBS attempted such a project last season. The new series still hails from writers and executive producers Tony Phelan and Joan Rater and executive producer Dan Jinks, who developed the CBS version, but the new series follows the author of the most famous female teen-detective book series who is thrust into a real-life murder mystery. In need of help, she turns to her two best friends from childhood, who were the inspiration for all those books, and the women who have a real axe to grind about the way their supposed best friend chose to portray them all those years ago. This will be a completely different version than the original at CBS. That project would have focused on Drew, now an adult who works as a detective for the NYPD. Sarah Shahi, who starred in the CBS drama Person of Interest since its second season, starred in the pilot as Drew but isn't currently attached to the NBC version.

• Barry Forshaw alerts us that, with this month’s release of Modesty Blaise: The Killing Game, Titan Books has completed its “all-inclusive run of Peter O’Donnell’s imperishable [British] comic strip Modesty Blaise (drawn by a variety of artists, including the great Jim Holdaway who inaugurated the strip and Enric Badia Romero, who concluded it).” Click here to find all of the preceding titles in this series.

• I’ve added several vintage TV openings to The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page, including those from Shotgun Slade, Johnny Bago (which features theme music by Jimmy Buffett), and Jack Palance’s Bronk.

• Florida’s Tampa Bay Times recently carried an interesting feature about how smoothly and satisfyingly author Michael Connelly has transferred his original series protagonist, Harry Bosch, from the page to the TV screen, in Amazon’s Bosch.

• Bookseller-turned-writer/editor Maxim Jakubowski has returned to CrimeTime as a monthly columnist, penning “To the Max.

• Fans of author Ted Lewis (Get Carter, GBH, etc.) should be interested to learn of a new volume, Nick Triplow’s Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir, being brought out by No Exit Press. Crime Fiction Lover opines that “meticulous and thorough detective work is at the heart of this compelling and detailed biography of Ted Lewis, the Humberside author of nine novels, who was a huge influence on Brit Noir and remains so for leading names in crime fiction today.” Sadly, Triplow’s work is currently available only in Britain, but a U.S. release (from Oldcastle Books) is slated for May 2018.

• Three author interviews worth your time: Thomas Mullen talks with MysteryPeople about Lightning Men, his exceptional sequel to last year’s Darktown; Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare chats with Joe Ide about Righteous, the second installment in his Isiah Quintabe series; and Geoffrey Girard fields a few queries from Mystery Tribune about his “contemporary gothic ghost story,” Mary Rose.

• And Peter Rozovsky, the Philadelphia editor, essayist, and photographer with whom I have frequently associated at Bouchercons over the last decade, takes questions from S.W. Lauden.

• With Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express set to reach theaters in November, Crime Fiction Lover has posted a photo tour of the author’s native Devon, England.

• Wow, this blog’s Facebook page seems to be experiencing a remarkable run of attention lately. In early October, I was impressed when a post there about the 60th anniversary of Have Gun—Will Travel “reached” more than 9,000 people. I thought that was some kind of record, but more recently, a post leading to The Rap Sheet’s coverage of the 2017 Anthony Award winners jetted right past that high bar, “reaching” 15,246 people. With 694 followers, the blog’s Facebook presence seems to be justifying my efforts to keep it lively.

• Feeding the grand debate over which of Raymond Chandler’s handful of novels qualifies as his “best,” Tablet magazine columnist Alexander Aciman delivers an outstanding appraisal of 1953’s The Long Goodbye. He writes, in part:

If Raymond Chandler’s earlier novels were detective stories that just so happened to be good, The Long Goodbye is a full reversal; it is a great novel that just so happens to be a detective story. It should be no different than saying Moby-Dick is a great novel that happens to be about whalers, or that Ulysses is a great novel that happens to take place in Dublin. But by describing it as detective fiction, we can obscure the fact for more than 60 years that it was one of the greatest novels ever written in America. There is hardly a novel more human, more heartbreaking, strung together with prose as boozily and as meticulously exacting as The Long Goodbye’s.

• I’ve lived in four U.S. states during my lifetime—Oregon, Michigan, Colorado, and Washington—and have gotten around to reading only one of the books Travel & Leisure magazine editors say best represent those places: Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, set in the Seattle area. In my defense, I did see the Jack Nicholson movie version of Stephen King’s The Shining (which ostensibly takes place in Colorado), and have read many other works on T&L’s list.

• For fans of “impossible crime” yarns.

• Here’s an excellent review of two new books that explore the fight against World War II-era Nazism in Los Angeles, California, and specifically in its glitziest quarter, Hollywood.

• This, too, sounds like a book I should have. In its write-up on Sinclair MacKay’s new non-fiction work, The Mile End Murder: The Case Conan Doyle Couldn't Solve (Aurum Press), Amazon explains: “In 1860, a 70-year-old widow turned landlady named Mary Emsley was found dead in her own home, killed by a blow to the back of her head. What followed was a murder case that gripped the nation, a veritable locked-room mystery which baffled even legendary Sherlock Holmes author, Arthur Conan Doyle. With an abundance of suspects, from disgruntled stepchildren concerned about their inheritance and a spurned admirer repeatedly rejected by the widow, to a trusted employee, former police officer and spy, the case led to a public trial dominated by surprise revelations and shock witnesses, before culminating with one of the final public executions at Newgate.”

• Your chance to get better acquainted with Frederic Brown: “‘Murder Draws a Crowd’ and ‘Death in the Dark’ by Fredric Brown (Haffner Press, $50 each) are the first two volumes in a well-designed, excellent new series edited by Steve Haffner, collecting all of Brown’s mystery fiction. … If you’ve never read anything by Fredric Brown, (1906-1972) you’re in for a real treat—he’s one of the genre’s most respected authors, long overdue for increased attention.”

• Who’d have thought that reading in bed could be dangerous? Many people once harbored such fears, according to The Atlantic:

Writings from the 18th and 19th centuries frequently dramatize the potentially horrifying consequences of reading in bed. Hannah Robertson’s 1791 memoir, Tale of Truth as well as of Sorrow, offers one example. It is a dramatic story of downward mobility, hinging on the unfortunate bedtime activities of a Norwegian visitor, who falls asleep with a book: “The curtains took fire, and [with] the flames communicating with other parts of the furniture and buildings, a great share of our possessions were consumed.”

Even the famous and the dead could be censured for engaging in the practice. In 1778, a posthumous biography chastised the late Samuel Johnson for his bad bedside reading habits, characterizing the British writer as an insolent child. A biography of Jonathan Swift alleged that the satirist and cleric nearly burned down the Castle of Dublin—and tried to conceal the incident with a bribe.

(Hat tip to January Magazine.)

• The Web’s latest plethora of Halloween-linked stories is just getting started. A site called Thrillist features this piece focusing on “the creepiest urban legend in every state.” BuzzFeed looks to Google Maps to find “the 31 most haunted places in America.” Mental Floss examines “the origins of 25 monsters, ghosts, and spooky things.” And adding a comical coda to these selections, Neatorama presents “The Story of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

• Los Angeles’ 1947 “Black Dahlia murder” is among that city’s most unsettling unsolved crimes. So it can only be with a chill that anyone would dress up as victim Elizabeth Short for Halloween.

• I usually think of H.G. Wells as a science-fiction writer (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, etc.). But he also produced a great deal of non-fiction, and evidently experimented as well with “criminous misadventures,” as Ontos recalls here.

• The Bookseller brings the sad news that Britain’s “campaign group Voices for the Library is to disband due to the pressures of the workload on its members. The group, which counts Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and author Julia Donaldson among its supporters, was created in 2010 to speak out and fight against the ‘assault’ on public libraries caused by deep cuts to the sector. In a statement posted on the Voices for the Library website, the group said: ‘Unfortunately, we ourselves are volunteers running an organisation in our spare time. We are unhappy to say that we can no longer undertake the work required to be a voice for public libraries. It is with great sorrow that we have decided that it’s time to close the doors on Voices for the Library. The irony of this is not lost on us.’”

• Finally, these are dark days, indeed, for “alternative newsweeklies.” The Village Voice, historically one of the strongest and most influential such newspapers, discontinued its print publication in September (though it’s still available online), and L.A. Weekly is currently experiencing a transition limbo likely to result in employee layoffs and a refocusing on its digital presence. Meanwhile, it appears that 41-year-old Seattle Weekly—which I was proud to work for during the late 1980s—will soon become unrecognizable. The Seattle news Web site Crosscut says that for budgetary reasons South Publishing, which has owned the tabloid-size paper since 2013, will restructure Seattle Weekly as a far less creative or challenging “community news weekly.” The paper’s staff will be slashed to just three employees (down from dozens of people who worked there when I did), and they will have no independent offices, but will be left to share editorial space and production facilities with Sound Publishing’s 16 other local small-time papers. This is tragic news, so far as I am concerned. I started out with “alt-weeklies” after college, working first for Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and eventually (after regrettable detours to a monthly magazine in Detroit and a daily broadsheet in Boulder, Colorado) wound up on the staff at Seattle Weekly, which was then known simply as The Weekly. That publication has had its ups and downs since David Brewster founded it in 1976, but it’s also produced a hell of a lot of solid, incisive reporting on politics, civic growth, the arts, local history, and much more. As with other alt-weeklies, Seattle Weekly suffered greatly with the rise of Internet advertising; however, I assumed it would ultimately find a way to make up for lost ad dollars and rebuild its journalistic stature. I guess I was wrong.

Bullet Points: Phooey on Rules Edition

That’s funny, I didn’t know there were any rules to follow when crafting “link posts” such as this one. I rarely see such compilations, and can think of only two other crime-fiction Web sites that regularly carry them: B.V. Lawson’s wonderful In Reference to Murder and the publisher-backed Criminal Element. So imagine my surprise at discovering, in The Digital Reader, Nate Hoffelder’s “Practical Guide to Developing Your Weekly or Monthly Link Post.” Coincidentally, I already follow his first two guidelines; but I regularly break the latter pair, especially Rule No. 4: “Keep it short. No one wants to read a link post with 30 links; readers’ eyes will glaze over by the tenth link, or they will be interrupted, or they’ll simply be overwhelmed. Try to aim for links to six to ten stories.” Hah! Anyone who’s been enjoying The Rap Sheet for a while knows that my “Bullet Points” gleanings of news from the world of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction can run on for 2,000 or more words, with dozens of Web links. And from what I’ve heard, that’s just the way most readers of this blog like them.

Now on with this week’s links compendium ...

• In Reference to Murder brings news that “BBC One has given the greenlight to an eight-part crime drama, The Dublin Murders, based on Tana French’s award-winning series of mysteries. Sarah Phelps, who recently reimagined several Agatha Christie novels for the BBC, will adapt the first two books about the fictional Dublin Murder Squad, drawn from French’s In the Woods and The Likeness. Blending psychological mystery and darkness, each novel is led by a different detective or detectives from the same Dublin squad.” Sounds terrific!

• I have to admit, my interest in another motion picture featuring Ernest Tidyman’s renowned black Manhattan private eye, John Shaft, waned seriously after it was announced that the film—tentatively titled Son of Shaft, and beginning production later this fall—would be an action-comedy, rather than a straight action pic. However, Steve Aldous, the UK-based author of The World of Shaft, continues to keep track of the venture, reporting in his blog that Netflix has agreed “to fund half the [movie’s] $30m budget in exchange for international rights. The deal reportedly means Netflix will be able to stream the movie just two weeks after its release.”

• Speaking of crime-related films, Criminal Element’s Peter Foy chooses his 10 favorites from the 21st century. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2010), The Departed (2006), and Kill Bill (2003) all made the cut. Sadly, other likely suspects, such as The Killer Inside Me (2010), Hart’s War (2001), and Road to Perdition (2002), did not.

• The mail recently brought me the Fall 2017 issue of Mystery Scene magazine. Beyond its well-executed cover profile of author Attica Locke (Bluebird, Bluebird), written by Ross Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan, this mag features Mark Mallory’s rewarding examination of Mark Twain’s crime fiction; a Martin Edwards piece about the revival of Golden Age mystery novels; Craig Sisterson’s fine report on New Zealand thriller writer Paul Cleave, a three-time winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel; a new column by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, in which they eulogize the late Ed Gorman; a look at James R. Benn’s World War II mysteries (the latest of those being The Devouring); and the inevitable much more. Mystery Scene is widely available at newsstands, but can also be ordered through the magazine’s Web site.

• In other print-publication news, this is the first and only review I have seen thus far of Down & Out: The Magazine, which debuted this summer. Although it fails to comment on my “Placed in Evidence” column, it is complimentary of both Reed Farrel Coleman’s original Moe Prager story, “Breakage,” and Michael A. Black’s “punchy Ron Shade tale,” “Dress Blues.” I’m not sure when, over the next three months, the second edition of Down & Out: The Magazine will appear, but editor Rick Ollerman has already gathered together its contents.

• The Houston, Texas-born Attica Locke makes another appearance, this time in the slick cyberpages of Literary Hub, writing about “her roots, the blues, and cowboy boots.”

• I won’t be attending next week’s Bouchercon in Toronto, Ontario, but Quebec-based Rap Sheet contributor Jacques Filippi has been asked to represent this blog at those festivities, complete with his trusty camera. I hope Bouchercon-goers will offer him the same respect and assistance they would me.

• Since we’re on the subject of Bouchercon, remember that attendees of that convention will have the opportunity to select the winners of this year’s Anthony Awards. The contenders are listed here. If you haven’t read (and judged) the five nominees for Best Short Story, and would like to do so before leaving for Toronto, simply click here for links to PDF versions of those abbreviated yarns.

• Have you heard of Medium, a partial-subscription site that blends wide-ranging original content with stories picked up from elsewhere on the Web? Yeah, neither had I, until I stumbled the other day over its readers’ picks list of “350 Mysteries and Thrillers to Read in a Lifetime.” There are many obvious selections among this bunch, including Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, Ross Macdonald’s The Galton Case, and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see the list make room as well for such works as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, Richard Hoyt’s Whoo?, Kate Ross’ Cut to the Quick, Arthur W. Upfield’s Man of Two Tribes, Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare, Michael Innes’ Hamlet, Revenge!, and Maurizio de Giovanni’s The Crocodile. There are lots of ideas there to build up your to-be-read stack.

• That reference to Alistair MacLean reminds me: Not long ago I came across, on YouTube, the much-lauded 1971 British thriller film Puppet on a Chain, based on MacLean’s Amsterdam-set novel of that same name. At least for the time being, you can watch the entire movie for yourself right here.

• And here is a better-than-average Eurospy flick, 1965’s Our Man in Jamaica. Wikipedia explains the plot this way:

Agent 001 Ken Stewart [played by American actor Larry Pennell] is sent to Jamaica to locate the missing Agent 009, who vanished [while] investigating an arms-smuggling operation. After two of Stewart’s friends are found dead of electrocution, 001’s investigation leads him to an expatriate American criminal who was sentenced to the electric chair but escaped from prison. Seeking revenge, he assembles an army of terrorists based on an island seven miles from Jamaica called Dominica. His arms smuggling is the beginning of a scheme to attack the United States with the aid of Red China and Cuba.

• Seattle Mystery Bookshop shut its doors this last weekend, after 27 years of business in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square area. But some of its employees have launched a post-store blog. It will be interesting to see how that develops. Meanwhile, the Seattle Mystery Bookshop—Hardboiled page, which focuses on covers from vintage crime novels and magazines, continues to be active on Tumblr.

• Here’s some exciting news: Tour guide/author Don Herron reports that Dashiell Hammett authority Richard Layman and Hammett’s best-known granddaughter, Julie M. Rivett, have co-edited The Big Book of the Continental Op (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard), which he says will, “for the first time ever … [gather] all the Op stories in one place.” This 752-page paperback collection is expected to reach bookstores by late November—conveniently in time for Christmas gift giving.

• In the latest edition of her newsletter, The Crime Lady, Sarah Weinman writes that “Max Haines, the dean of Canadian true-crime writing, has died. I grew up reading his columns [in the Toronto Sun], which were smart, incisive, and always worth reading.” Haines succumbed to progressive supranuclear palsy at age 86.

• The October number of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots includes observations on prolific author James Hadley Chase, the “rediscovery” of Golden Age novelist Christopher Bush, Minette Walters’ turn toward historical fiction, and new books by Christopher Brookmyre, Margaret Kirk, Chris Pettit, and Ben Aaronovich. Read all of Ripley’s musings here.

• How’d you like your own Jim Rockford business cards?

• Oh no, Charlie’s Angels is back, this time in film form, with notoriously wooden Twilight star Kristen Stewart tipped to play one of the curvaceous crime solvers.

• Los Angeles history specialist Larry Harnisch worked for many years as a copy editor at the L.A. Times, while simultaneously producing a Web-based feature for that newspaper called The Daily Mirror. In 2011, the Times killed his blog “because of low Web traffic,” but let Harnisch continue his history-journaling as a personal project—which is exactly what he’s done, writing about photos, intriguing myths, curious characters, and ephemera from L.A.’s past. Harnisch has also made himself an expert on the January 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, aka “The Black Dahlia.” And he’s become a frequent critic of books and other reports claiming to have solved that sensational homicide. Those include documentary producer Piu Eatwell’s Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder (Liveright), which goes on sale next week. Although he remarks in a new post, “I don’t plan to do a line-by-line debunking,” Harnisch observes that there are “two elementary blunders” on the first page of Eatwell’s preface, which suggests “that poor work is ahead.” He promises further observations on the book, “as time allows.”

• Much has been said over the decades about plot holes Raymond Chandler left in his first novel, 1939’s The Big Sleep (see here and here)—enough that some clever soul decided to redesign the 1958 Pocket Books edition of Chandler’s yarn with a title reflecting such confusion. The artwork for both this modified cover, on the left, and the original paperback, is credited to Ernest Chiriacka, aka Darcy. (Hat tip to J.R. Sanders on Facebook.)

• I don’t think I mentioned this previously, but English actress Claire Foy—perhaps best recognized of late for her starring role as Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s The Crown—has been tapped to play a much rougher role, that of abundantly tattooed Lisbeth Salander in a film adaptation of David Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Set for release in October 2018, this movie will launch Sony Pictures’ reboot of its Millennium series, which began with the 2011 American film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on Stieg Larsson’s 2007 novel of that same name.

• It sounds as if British author Anthony Horowitz is moving right along with his second James Bond novel, the as-yet-untitled follow-up to 2015’s splendid Trigger Mortis.

• Congratulations to Bill Selnes, the lawyer who blogs at Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan, for producing his 1,000th post.

• With the 168th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth coming up this Saturday, October 7, Criminal Element is hosting a poll to determine that author’s most popular short story.

• Augustus Rose’s premiere crime novel, The Readymade Thief (Viking), is one of seven finalists in the running for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction.

• The Web site Cinephilia & Beyond revisits the 1981 motion picture Thief, exploring “how [director] Michael Mann’s cinema debut stole the world’s attention.” Which reminds me, I really should screen that movie again sometime soon.

• Who remembers Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator, the 1951-1955 NBC Radio drama series starring William Gargan as a Manhattan private eye who, explains The Thrilling Detective Web Site, was “your man when you can’t go to the cops. Confidentiality a specialty”? Well, I certainly did not. But the classic-radio blog Down These Mean Streets recently posted this fine profile of Gargan (who also portrayed P.I. Martin Kane), and I tracked down 59 episodes of the Craig series online. That’s plenty of listening pleasure for yours truly.

• I don’t usually say much here about The Rap Sheet’s presence on social media—Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Those other pages exist primarily to promote this blog, not to substitute for it. And they all register fairly high traffic volumes, but I was surprised to see that a post noting the 60th anniversary of Have Gun—Will Travel’s debut on September 14, 1957, received much more attention than any other I’ve ever posted on Facebook. At last count, it had “reached” 9,474 people. It seems there’s a huge crossover between Rap Sheet readers and fans of that long-ago Richard Boone Western/detective series.

• Felix Francis, whose latest novel, Pulse, is out this month in the States, recalls for Shotsmag Confidential how he started taking over the family business of mystery writing even before the death, in 2010, of his famous jockey-turned-novelist father, Dick Francis.

• And here are a few crime fiction-related interviews worth your time to check out: Diane B. Saxton (Peregrine Island) and Brad Abraham (Magicians Impossible) are Nancie Clare’s latest guests on her podcast, Speaking of Mysteries; reviewer Alex Hawley presents his conversation with Craig Sisterson, the founder of New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh Awards for crime fiction, over the course of two blog posts—here and here; Sujata Massey, author of a forthcoming Bombay-set mystery, The Widows of Malabar Hill, talks with her editor, Juliet Grames, about that novel’s background; the blog Black Gates chats with Grady Hendrix about his distinctive new non-fiction work, Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction; among the guests on Episode 9 of Writer Types are Attica Locke, Frank Zafiro, Emma Viskic, and Andrew Nette; and during lawyer F. Lee Bailey’s 1967 conversation with Sean Connery, the actor who had by then portrayed James Bond in five films says he has finally tired of the role: “It’s some sort of Frankenstein,” he groused.

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.

Classics Both “Lost” and Reinterpreted

Several times over the past few years, I’ve mentioned that Northern California artist, photographer, and author Derek Pell was creating a pictorial collection of 100 “missing mysteries,” mischievous covers he created for whodunit and thriller novels that never actually existed. For a while, he was posting occasional new fronts from that series on a page of his online magazine, Zoom Street. Later, after failing to find a print publisher for the completed book, Pell put it entirely online as a PDF document.

The bad news is that the PDF now appears to have vanished from the Internet, leaving me with some broken links in The Rap Sheet (grrrr!). The good news is that Pell recently released Missing Mysteries: A Pictorial History of Nonexistent Mysteries through his own publishing imprint, Black Scat Books; you can now acquire a copy of this large-format paperback from Amazon or directly from his printer, CreateSpace (which, like so many other companies these days, also happens to be owned by Amazon). As press materials explain, Missing Mysteries comes “packed with pulp, crimes, dicks, dames, thugs, puns, gumshoes, and stoolies. Loaded with laughs, maps, gaffs, noir, conundrums, puzzles, and quizzes. 196 pages crammed with over 100 full-color cover reproductions, plus startling excerpts, scathing reviews, outlandish blurbs and mysterious synopses.” Pell takes flagrant liberties with the artwork from vintage crime-fiction paperbacks to create new and outlandish façades for volumes you only wish had once decorated bookshelve.

Where else than in Pell’s book, for instance, could you read about Dashiell Hammett’s obscure Sam Spade novel, Murder Is a Four-Letter Word … Raymond Chandler’s Call Me Shallow, But Bury Me Deep … Carolyn Keene’s forgotten Nancy Drew masterpiece, Look at This Dripping Brain! … Norbert Davis’ Sweatin’ Bullets (starring hard-boiled dick Lance Milhaus, the Sweaty Detective) … Edna LaRue’s Shopping Moll … Earl Derr Biggers’ 1942 Charlie Chan mystery, The Man Who Chew Too Much … Brenda Starr’s Typos Are My Business … Ngaio Marsh’s immortal classic, Dead Men Don’t Snore (“After the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960, many female filmgoers refused to takes showers fearing the fate of its heroine. A similar phenomenon occurred among married men when this novel appeared, and ‘separate bedrooms’ [as well as divorce] became commonplace.”) … Joe Gores’ Assault and Flattery … Mickey Spillane’s Eat Me Deadly … and of course Agatha Christie’s Waiting for Poirot (“This was Christie’s most ambitious literary experiment, for she knew writing an Existential might end her career.”). Pell’s satire doesn’t lack for sharp edges. His twisted humor is sure to appeal to crime-fiction lovers. It’s only too bad this $29.95 book came out after Christmas.

* * *

Also worth watching for is the English-language version of The Black Dahlia: A Crime Graphic Novel, by French writer Matz (aka Alexis Nolent) and American film director David Fincher, with artistry by Miles Hyman. This work—based on James Ellroy’s grimly evocative 1987 novel, The Black Dahlia—originally appeared in France in 2013. But as the Los Angeles Times relates, it will finally be published in the States on June 7 “by Archaia, an imprint of Boom! Studios. The cover of the new English hardcover edition will feature a brand new image by Hyman.” And what a gorgeous wraparound image it is:



When asked by reporter Tracy Brown whether the infamously opinionated Ellroy had seen this graphic-novel adaptation of his book and provided any “feedback,” Matz responded:

I did get his feedback. The book would not have gotten made if James hadn’t approved the script. The day I sent it to James, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I’d have to trash all this work I had done if he didn’t like it. It made me quite scared and worried and wonder why I took this job in the first place.

But the day I got his feedback was a day I’ll never forget, as it was a short two-word message: “Fantastic job.”

And that was it. It made me happier than I can describe, and I’ll be forever grateful to James for it. David Fincher and I shared a moment of real happiness then, with a little pride, too. Getting this feedback from [Ellroy], whom I admire so much, it was really something.

I believe James is quite happy with the graphic novel.
Happy enough that we are talking about doing another one. I hope it happens.

At 176 pages long, The Black Dahlia: A Crime Graphic Novel is scheduled to be released in hardcover format with price tag of $29.99. You can learn more here. See some interior pages here.

A Lady They Talk About

Los Angeles’ 1947 “Black Dahlia” case continues to fascinate.

Coming Up Short

Today marks the 65th anniversary of Los Angeles’ notorious “Black Dahlia murder.” The victim was an unemployed, 22-year-old woman from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Short, whose mutilated corpse was discovered on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue. Short had last been seen six days before in downtown’s elegant Biltmore Hotel. The murder--which has inspired a great deal of fiction over the decades, including the 1975 TV film Who Is the Black Dahlia?, James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia (1987) and Max Allan Collins’ Angel in Black (2001)--was never solved.

You can find out more about the case here and here.

ALERT: At least for the time being, the teleflick Who Is the Black Dahlia?--which starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Lucie Arnaz, the latter playing the ill-fated Ms. Short--can be viewed in its entirety here.

READ MORE: “The Black Dahlia Murder: The 65th Anniversary,”
by Craig McDonald.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Other Girl,” by Theodora Keogh

(Editor’s note: This is the 102nd installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection has been made by Steven Powell, an editor of the forthcoming Conversations with James Ellroy [a volume of UMISS Press’ Literary Conversations Series], and the 2012 non-fiction release 100 American Crime Writers. He is studying for a Ph.D. on the fiction of James Ellroy at Britain’s University of Liverpool, and blogs about crime fiction in The Venetian Vase.)

Some books defy genre and subgenre labels. Theodora Keogh’s novel about Los Angeles’ 1947 Black Dahlia murder, The Other Girl (1962), is one such work. It could be read as a psychological suspense novel or as lesbian pulp fiction. It has the jet-black philosophy of hard-boiled crime fiction but the elegant prose of a Golden Age detective story. It is impossible to categorize the novel as being definitively of any one of these subgenres, as it would be a reductive to a novel that so seamlessly interweaves many styles, and ultimately leaves the impression that Keogh regarded herself as above crime fiction. It is telling, then, that The Other Girl would be Keogh’s final novel: her work would soon be out of print, and all critical interest would fade.

When news reached the blogosphere of the passing of Theodora Keogh on January 5, 2008, it generated a wave of speculation, debate and a renewed interest in her work as a novelist. Who was this woman? Why are all of her novels out of print? The Daily Telegraph published the only comprehensive obituary of Keogh, and it was through the Telegraph that I, like many crime-fiction readers, first heard her name. Keogh had led a fascinating life, which alone could provide material for a dozen novels. Born in New York in 1919, the granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, Keogh was educated in Manhattan and Munich, worked as a dancer in Canada and South America, and designed costumes for films such as The Pirate (1948) and Daddy Long Legs (1955), amongst many other triumphs and disasters.

By comparison, her literary career, although influential, formed a relatively minor part of her life. Keogh published nine novels between 1950 and 1962. It was her last book, The Other Girl--a fictionalization of the murder of Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia--that took me by surprise. I thought I had read every Dahlia book out there, both fact and fiction. Around the time I heard about Keogh’s novel, I was conducting a series of phone interviews with James Ellroy, author of The Black Dahlia (1987). Had he read The Other Girl? Ellroy informed me that he had neither read nor heard of the book, or of Keogh. Now my curiosity had got me hooked. I purchased a second-hand copy over the Internet and sat down to read the novel. Although I had built up my expectations, I was not disappointed. I read The Other Girl in a single setting, and instantly came to regard it as a classic of the same stature as John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions (1977) and Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.

Although in Dunne’s and Ellroy’s novels Elizabeth Short is not so much a character as a ghost, haunting the lives of those trying to solve her brutal murder (in True Confessions, Miss Short was renamed Lois Fazenda, “the Virgin Tramp”), in The Other Girl she is a character, referred to quite simply as Betty. Betty is just one of a cast of oddballs and eccentrics whom Keogh weaves around Los Angeles’ most infamous and gruesome unsolved crime. The novel’s main focus is on Marge Vulawski, the daughter of immigrant workers who has grown up on a farm just outside of L.A. Marge came to the City of Angels with high hopes but has become bitter and cynical, as her practical know-how with farm machinery and her broad build have led her to a unexciting job as a garage mechanic. In the city, Marge befriends Zoe, a woman who calls herself “the Duchess,” and was once, by her own account, a lady of wealth and importance. Now virtually penniless, the Duchess still wears the luxurious clothes of her better days, but the clothes are, in a reference to Dickens’ Miss Haversham, literally rotting on her and symbolize her decline. Through Zoe, Marge meets Betty at a local drugstore. Betty is an aspiring actress who is represented by the sleazy agent Herman Lee: Lee has never had a successful client, but he does not want one, as he preys on their naiveté. Marge is instantly attracted to Betty, but her sexuality is treated with ambiguity and at times appears to be more of a yearning for friendship. Marge’s desire to be around Betty means tagging along with her on a date with two French sailors. In one of the novel’s most powerful (and for the time groundbreaking) scenes, Marge and Betty have their first sexual contact with each other during an orgy with the two men:

But her [Betty’s] breasts themselves were surprisingly small; fresh and round and shiny like a peeled twig with dark, insulting nipples. The fresh, tender lower curves of these breasts entered into Marge’s memory for ever. They merged with childhood dreams, with infancy. They became the salty, threaded stuff of her generation.

Was what followed called an orgy? The French sailors hadn’t treated it as such. To them it appeared natural, neither odd nor perverse.

The Other Girl is unusual amongst crime novels as it does not begin with a crime that kick-starts the plot and motivates the leading character to try and solve the mystery. Nor is there any significant back-story to shed light on where the plot is heading. This novel is not so much a whodunnit as a who-will-do-it. Keogh supplies a detailed character study of a bunch of unusual people and then follows them as their relationship with Betty gradually turns from attraction to bitterness and sexual jealously. Each character is given a motive for murdering Betty, but how will the narrative move toward the act, and who will be responsible? Keogh keeps you guessing right up until the shocking climax.

Despite the initial interest in Keogh following her passing, no serious reappraisal of her literary career followed. This is, perhaps, to be expected as the tone of The Other Girl can be alienating, and the novel is difficult to place within a genre. Keogh’s sketches of people who have lost their soul while looking for a glimmer of success sometimes reads as misanthropic. Her candid description of sexual experimentation is liable to offend many readers, but the ambiguity of Marge’s sexuality has probably also barred the novel from becoming a classic of lesbian pulp fiction alongside the works of Ann Bannon or Valerie Taylor. Perhaps this obscurity was just what Keogh intended.

The Other Girl is a brilliant novel which has lost none of its power to be both haunting and puzzling.

Dahlia Droops After Opening Weekend

Josh Hartnett and Hilary Swank in The Black Dahlia.

We’ve been anticipating the opening of The Black Dahlia, the Brian De Palma film based on the 1987 James Ellroy novel of the same title. While we waited, we gave the whole thing some thought, including articles by J. Kingston Pierce, here and here, and also here.

Well, the first reviews are in now and--overall--they’re not good. In fact, some of them are more violent than the R-rated film itself.

Here, for example, from IF Magazine: “The Black Dahlia is one of the most convoluted, cobbled-up, wastes of film that has been released in recent months.”

(Yes, but do you think they had an opinion?)

The Washington Post could have spared itself the review; the paper said it all in its headline, “Black Dahlia Withers Fast,” though the review’s final line summarizes the film brutally: “Here's the lowdown, the q.t., the true gen: The Black Dahlia is a big nowhere.”

The Times of London’s headline was so nifty, one couldn’t help but wonder if it had been pondered well before the viewing of this film. How much more succinct could it get than “L.A. Inconsequential,” a title that not only lets us know exactly what the reviewer thought of the movie, but also references another Ellroy novel that made a much smoother transition to the silver screen.

Mike Straka from Fox News said: “Are you having trouble sleeping at night? Do you toss and turn, count sheep and nothing helps you put your tired eyes and body to rest? Well, fear not. Coming to a theater near you is The Black Dahlia ...”

There are more, but I’ll stop. You get the general idea: I don’t know yet if viewers have been enjoying the movie, but reviewers sure haven’t so far.

* * *

The Los Angeles Times reports that the film took in $10.4 million at the box-office during its opening weekend, coming in second place behind Gridiron Gang’s $15 million.

Analysts said the second-place showing was a disappointment for Universal Studios, which had pushed the film with a marketing blitz that included reprints of Los Angeles Times articles about the original case and a virtual tour of “Black Dahlia” sites on America Online.

In fairness, the article also mentions that box office totals were down 11.8 percent from the same period last year. Even so, it can’t have been fun for De Palma to get trashed by a movie starring The Rock.

The Houston Chronicle’s Louis B. Parks looks at The Black Dahlia from a different place. He saves his bullets for another day and instead compares De Palma’s flick to Hollywoodland, another recently released period piece that fictionalizes a different real Hollywood death--in this case, that of early Superman star, George Reeves, surprisingly well played here by Ben Affleck. Then Parks looks at how and where both movies fit into the film noir oeuvre. The piece is a must-read for those who enjoy noir and would like a better understanding of it.

The reviewers mostly agree: Ellroy’s novel is classic, untouchable. De Palma’s film, however, is beautiful but incomprehensible. Yet, despite the serious trash talking, I can hardly wait to see it for myself. I’ve got a hunch that other fans of crime fiction will agree.

READ MORE: “Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia,” by Larry Harnisch (The Daily Mirror).