Deze serie duikt in de rauwe onderbuik van Los Angeles in de jaren '40 en '50. Het volgt met elkaar verbonden verhalen die diepgewortelde misdaad en corruptie blootleggen. Elk deel introduceert nieuwe personages, maar ze zijn allemaal verbonden door de verstikkende sfeer van de naoorlogse metropool. Het is een rauwe kijk op misdaad, moreel verval en de menselijke natuur in de stad der engelen.
Los Angeles, 1th January 1947: a beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in helf. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops are caught up in the investigation and embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life. The first part of Ellroy's crime fiction masterwork, the LA Quartet, and based around a real murder case, The Black Dahlia pulses with violence, darkness and brutality. It is crime writing at its most powerful.
El 15 de enero de 1947, en un solar desocupado de Los Ángeles, apareció el cadáver, desnudo y seccionado en dos, de una mujer joven. El médico forense determinó que la habían torturado durante días. Elizabeth Short, de 22 años, llamada Dalia Negra, llevará a los detectives a los bajos fondos de Hollywood, para así involucrar a ciertas personas adineradas de Los Ángeles. Basándose en este suceso, Ellroy construye esta novela, en la que plasma la relación entre dos policías, ex boxeadores, y enamorados de la misma mujer. Ambos, además, obsesionados por lo que fue la vida de la Dalia Negra y, sobre todo, por capturar al individuo que la asesinó.
"L.A. is a city where it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad. At Central Police Station, Christmas 1951, cops beat up six suspects. This will change the careers of the three LAPD detectives involved"--http://trove.nla.gov.au
L.A., 1958. Corrupt Lt. Dave Klein, rapidly into a morass of bribes, fixes, and murder, hunts a thief whose crime-family victims don't want him caught and agrees to dig dirt on a Howard Hughes starlet--all while struggling to duck the fallout from his latest killing. As controversy over the proposed stadium for the Dodgers in Chavez Ravine brings city politics to a boil, Dave gets the word from mobster Mickey Cohen to help Sanderline Johnson, a half-wit croupier picked up in a raid, out his ninth-floor window before he can testify. The official verdict is flipped-out suicide, but the murder squeezes Dave between his department patron, detective chief Ed Exley; his would-be patron, Capt. Dudley Smith, deep in the Organization's pocket; double-dealing D.A. Bob Gallaudet; and Welles Noonan, a politically-minded US attorney with blood in his eye. Meanwhile, Exley puts Dave in charge of a break-in to the home of mobster J. C. Kafesjian, who wants him off the case; and Dave falls in love with Glenda Bledsoe, the starlet whose contract Hollywood mogul Hughes wants to break--and vows to protect her from the man whose money he's taking to break her. As if all this weren't trouble enough, somebody (Exley? Gallaudet? Dud Smith?) frames Dave for a murder that's been captured on film.
