Welcome to the first session of the Black Dahlia Book Club! I finally got tired of talking about George Hodel and Steve Hodel (at this point, I know Steve’s monologues from memory) so I decided to spend some time looking at the portrayals of the Black Dahlia case, starting with the October 1948 issue of True Detective, which touched off the Leslie Dillion debacle. I consider myself first and foremost a historian of the Black Dahlia case, and think it’s important to examine the source material in detail to emphasize the challenges of researching the murder of Elizabeth Short.

The next Ask Me Anything on the Black Dahlia case is February 3. The next Black Dahlia Book Club session will be February 17. I’ll announce the subject a week before.

In this session, I discussed:

–Pulp magazines and “slick” magazines.

–The genres of the pulp magazines, in fiction and nonfiction.

–Fiction genres were: Mystery magazines, confession magazines, romance magazines, Westerns, science fiction, and the men’s magazines.

—Hobbyist magazines.

–And finally the detective magazines.

–Who was George Clark, author of “The Black Dahlia Murders?”

–What was the source material for “The Black Dahlia Murders?”

–The structure of the story.

–The errors in the story.

-Weaving in other murders in San Diego and Los Angeles.

–Paul De River.

–John Gilmore’s Severed (which will be the subject of an upcoming episode).

–Eli Frankel’s Sisters in Death.

–Alex Baber’s claims in a February 2022 interview on CrimeHQ.

–William J. Mann’s Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood.

–Piu Eatwell’s Black Dahlia, Red Rose.

–The Leslie Dillon debacle.