Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The murder of the young, pretty, would-be starlet Elizabeth Short was particularly gruesome. The body was found in a vacant lot literally cut in half. Both halves were lying near a sidewalk easily visible from the street. The body remained in the lot for sometime and drew onlookers. I remember the atmosphere of life in the late forties, and compared with today, we were all unabashed gawkers. There was little of the finicky nature of turning away from the horrible then. Today it seems almost as if this era is as remote from us today as is the Civil War when people turned out to watch hangings.

Gilmore takes us on his own long journey of personal discovery as well as retracing the journey of the sad and confused Miss Short from eager young hopeful in Hollywood to unidentified body on a slab in the county morgue. The Dahlia seems to have been drawn almost inexorably towards a tragic death. She is the ultimate victim, helpless and lost, wandering the streets of downtown LA until she more or less disappears only to reappear and become a legend that illustrates the fallacies of Tinseltown and the realities of life on the unromantic streets.

The strange and affecting style of this book is what sets it apart from most books in the true crime genre. For one thing, there appears to be something of an attachment by Mr. Gilmore to his subject that is vaguely perverted in itself. And his interest in the Dahlia seems, at least in part, sexual, as was the interest of many men in Los Angeles toward this displaced child/woman. Though Gilmore does his best to keep his perspective professional, his emotional connection to the woman is always there. This is what makes this book even more compelling. Sometimes I got the feeling that Gilmore was trying to find out who killed his girlfriend rather than a long dead stranger (whom he may have met as a boy). This heightens the level of excitement and anguish while stoking a certain salaciousness to the whole undertaking. It is impossible, when dealing with the Black Dahlia murder, to separate objective police research with an undercurrent of lascivious interest in her. Who was she having sex with? What was she doing to the men and what were they doing to her? These thoughts permeate the case and cannot be brushed away through a pretense of "getting to the bottom" of something. And Gilmore more than understands this. He does not exploit it so much as acknowledges it; it's part of who and what the whole case has always been about.

The reader will find him or herself unable to look away, much as people did in those days. The more horrible the death, the prettier the victim, the more we looked. And the fact that the body was naked simply engulfed the public in a salacious atmosphere that resembles the old circus "freak shows" where we paid a quarter to stare at people who were disabled or stricken with some awful disease. This kind of thing gives a kind of imprimatur to our rude and ghoulish interest. After all, this was a famous murder. How can we not be interested? It is on this basis that "Severed" is so attractive to us. It's a book, with evidence, with hard detective work and some interesting speculation on the part of Gilmore that offers a new possibility as to who she was and to who might have been, in fact, her murderer. There are facts revealed in this book that were new, at least to me. The hint of a sexual dysfunction that Miss Short suffered from only makes the whole thing more even more gothic.

All in all, I believe that this book should be considered a masterpiece of its kind. It does what novels try to do. It involves the reader even when the reader wishes to remain clear and objective. We follow the Dahlia all the way to the place where she was (possibly) killed. We watch the murder and dismemberment. We watch the dumping of the body and we stand on the sidewalk with the other curious citizens whispering and craning our necks for a better view. All in all, this is a cathartic work that allows us to exercise our baser instincts in safety. But it must have haunted Mr. Gilmore for many years, both before and after he wrote it. All in all, a terrific book.

That is, of course, if you like that sort of thing.

EKW