“Everyone’s Favorite Dead Girl”: Historical Crime Fiction and Postwar Policing in James Ellroy’s <em>The Black Dahlia</em>

This thesis argues for the importance of crime fiction as a major literary genre with global reach. Taken as a whole, crime fiction acts as a vehicle for exploring macro-level questions of social structures, political-economic processes and power relations. Within that genre, I claim that James Ellroy is a key figure who writes at the intersection of the historical novel and literary noir. As the first work in his L.A. Quartet (1987-1992), The Black Dahlia fictionalizes the investigation of the city’s most famous unsolved homicide—the gruesome murder and mutilation of Elizabeth Short. The novel, however, uses the investigation as a pretext for depicting the historical context of postwar American society, offering readers an opportunity to view past crimes as the prehistory of the present. In the novel, L.A. is portrayed as a site of terminal dysfunction and social inequality that provides the space for critical reflection, particularly on the systemic nature of policing and gendered violence. Ellroy’s historical crime novel, I argue, critiques postwar American society through its representation of the everyday nature of violence and marginalization in this chapter of the city’s development. These depictions of policing and gendered violence show readers that power structures are socially constructed and historically contingent rather than transhistorical, immutable truths.