A pitfall lies in wait for the true-crime author who chooses to explore a grisly murder: Describing the killing in lurid detail may seem sensationalist, even sadistic. Yet in writing his new book, “Black Dahlia,” William J. Mann had no choice but to explain exactly what befell Elizabeth “Betty” Short, the 22-year-old woman whose brutalized body was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 1947.
Short’s murder occasioned a slew of newspaper headlines and articles during the two or three years after her death and has since figured in several novels, notably James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia” (1987) and Michael Connelly’s “The Waiting” (2024), as well as a number of movies and TV episodes. Short’s moniker goes back to a coincidence: the release of a film noir, “The Blue Dahlia,” starring Veronica Lake, a few months before Short’s death. Lake’s character, the unfaithful wife of a returning GI played by Alan Ladd, was not called the Blue Dahlia – that was the name of the L.A. nightclub owned by her paramour. But on the strength of Short’s glorious head of black hair, she got stuck with that nickname. This was a pity because, as Mann painstakingly shows, the term’s sinister connotations have nothing to do with Short’s personality or lifestyle.
Rather, Mann’s admirably researched and generous book portrays Short as ahead of her time in claiming the freedom allowed young men. The middle sister of five raised by a single mother who worked as a bookkeeper in Medford, Massachusetts, Short had left home in 1942 and gone west to alleviate the respiratory problems that had plagued her since childhood, to reunite with her long-absent father and to see the wider world…