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Although I am a keen crime fiction reader I do not like true crime books very much and tend to avoid them. But for every rule there has to be an exception and in this case it is the notorious Black Dahlia murder discovered on the 15th January 1947 in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. This was a murder so vicious and grotesque that even the most hardened journalists and cops were stunned.

There is no doubt in my mind that Piu Eatwell, in a very fine piece of investigative journalism, has solved this crime once and for all, seventy-plus years after it was committed. Many will know the bare bones of the case: the victim had been beaten, strung up by the wrists, her mouth slashed open from ear to ear, a deep gaping slit cut from the pubic area, and most shockingly of all she had been cut entirely in half through the abdomen, with the two sections arranged a foot apart. She was eventually identified as Elizabeth Short, aged 22, from Medford, Massachusetts, and like so many others, an aspiring actress.

As the author demonstrates, in the late 1940s the Los Angeles Police Department was corrupt with many of the patrolmen, captains and lieutenants accepting bribes and kickbacks from local mobsters to turn a blind eye. Worse still, they were almost indifferent to solving crimes and very slow to react to events.

As in vintage Hollywood movies the driving force in detection were crime reporters from the dozens of Los Angeles newspapers, each vying to be the first to break lurid stories. For example, Agness Underwood, veteran crime reporter of the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Express was one of the first people at the murder scene, and a short description of her crime reporting career is truly jaw dropping. The newspapers had deeper pockets than the police department, and would spend lavishly to get the edge over their rivals.

Almost unbelievably, there were worse atrocity murders in Los Angeles that same year yet it was the crime reporters nickname for Elizabeth Short that caught the public imagination and made the case so famous. The year before, in 1946, the hit noir film The Blue Dahlia scripted by Raymond Chandler and starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake was released. Once it was known that Elizabeth had a profusion of jet black hair it did not take long for the name Black Dahlia to take hold.

Piu Eatwell is a tenacious and diligent investigator, even discovering the motel room (still standing) where Elizabeth was butchered, and by whom and more importantly why she was murdered. Put aside any other theories you may have read, including the fictional account by James Ellroy, as this is the definitive solution.

Elizabeth Short's life is perhaps best summed up by Jimmy Richardson, city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner:

"She was a pitiful wanderer, ricocheting from one cheap job to another and from one cheap man to another in a sad search for a good husband and a home and happiness. Not bad, not good. Just lost and trying to find a way out."

Available at Amazon in paperback for £9.99 or as a Kindle download for £3.99.

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