The Nervous Purvis

Despite reading an embarrassing number of murder mystery stories, I’ve never been too much of a true crime reader. I think it’s the whole “this happened to real people” thing—if it’s someone in Miss Marple’s acquaintance or Michael Myers’s second cousin getting slaughtered, I’m positively gleeful about it, but if you remind me that this was an actual person with an actual family, it kind of…takes the fun out of it. Rather obviously. Recently, though, I was reading an interview with Megan Abbott—a modern author who’s written some really great books I can only describe as feminist noir—and she was talking about how much she loved the true crime genre, and made the mistake of looking up a few of the authors she mentioned, which is how I ended up whipping through Severed, by John Gilmore, in about two evenings’ reading.

And yes: it’s a book about the Black Dahlia. Called “Severed.” No points for subtlety here. But that said, I actually really enjoyed the book. Gilmore takes his time setting up the story; after an initial explanation of the crime scene, he backtracks through Elizabeth Short’s life, which seems to have been characterised by a particularly Hollywood-style scrabbling for existence. Once he circles back to the murder, Gilmore then spends some time tracking the progress of the LAPD’s investigation, which was gory for wholly different reasons—apparently in the 1940s the Los Angeles mortuary was known for its disorganisation and filth; he tells one anecdote about a body being released back to the family with the face left peeled down the skull post-autopsy. Charming stuff. And finally, he gets into a post-script to the story that I’d never heard before—that in the 1960s, the LAPD was finally near arresting a suspect for Elizabeth Short’s murder…only to have him die in a hotel fire, ensuring the case remains formally unsolved.

If the story about the morgue didn’t tip you off, one last word of advice from me—if you’re not a regular true crime reader, be warned that the documentation is, erm, on the explicit side. At the end of the book (at least on a Kindle—I’m not sure where this is in a physical book) there are several pages of photographs, and I was happily flipping through photos of Elizabeth Short, her friends, and boyfriends, only to turn the page onto a very close-up, very explicit photo from her autopsy. I know I’m explaining the obvious here—wait, you mean a book about a murder might include disturbing stuff about a murder?!—but if you’re a fellow newbie, be warned.

I think what I took away most from this book is more of a meta-observation—Elizabeth Short’s brief life and gruesome death seem to have captivated a number of male writers. Gilmore includes a preface in which he goes after James Ellroy with a stiletto, and that tone of possessiveness is one Ellroy shares. These men seem really invested in being seen as understanding Elizabeth Short and being connected to her. I’d be really interested in finding out if any women have written about the Black Dahlia murder. I think for some men, the idea of a glamorous, vulnerable woman dying in a horrible way is uniquely fascinating. I suspect for most women, the idea that being a pretty woman could get you killed isn’t surprising at all.