Customer Reviews

Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

John Gilmore has written the ungarnished story of Elizabeth Short. This is a brilliant book. He has uncovered her past, her days and nights in Hollywood; she becomes for the reader the real person that she was. Anyone who calls this book "trash" is 1) the Steve Hodel/James Ellroy front, or 2) a moron, entertained only by books for morons. Buy this book; it is gold.

Gilmore had it right when he wrote this concise, hard-bitten chunk of L.A. history in a prose and style that made the hair on my neck stand up and salute! He keeps getting it right every time he opens his mouth on some History Channel or E! show, talking about that totally and awesomely delectable Elizabeth Short, Night Queen of the LA back streets and cheap hotels and dingy bars crammed with gobs and loud-mouths and tinhors and grifters, all lookin' for a ticket to ride.

I've gone from the first page to the end on 230 a half dozen times and haven't had my fill. Sorry all you other droops on the bandwagon, wish I could say the same but I can't. This one's right and ain't no coypu showing plastic teeth.

Cool book. Cool read about a pretty girl as pretty as a full moon; skin as white and eyes as deep; sweet lost Betty/Beth/Elizabeth, to meet your Maker on such a hard, hard, lonely road. The loss of her makes you want to puke! A salute to cult-king John Gilmore for makin' me feel so sorry she's gone.

John Gilmore's SEVERED was the first true crime book to appear on the Black Dahlia case, the most notorious unsolved murder in the annuls of Los Angeles crime. The beautiful Elizabeth Short, known before her savage murder as the Black Dahlia, has been become an international cult icon of the noir atmosphere since Gilmore's astounding book was published. Other books have tried to follow his lead but pale dreadfully in comparison. Nothing comes close to this riveting work, an almost mythical symbol of Hollywood Babylon/film noir glamour-cum-sordidness. An excursion into the life and desperate desires of this wannabe starlet who finds her fame only in her own brutal murder. Grim, bleak, and intense, this work as well offers a possible solution to the murder which cannot, Gilmore presents, ever be legally solved. This errie and dark mystery will endure and haunt us forever. A highly recommended read, though very graphic photos may disturb the more easily-shocked reader.

I have finished the UK edition and find this to be an amazing, superb work. A brand new review in a UK magazine calls SEVERED a work "that borders on poetry in its purity and which more than any other title extant is responsible for the Dahlia's rise as a counter-culture madonna, Our Lady of Perpetual Pain and Suffering..." Well put. I wholly agree, and highly recommend this book.

You are smacked into the middle of the 1940's in tinseltown, and all the crackpots and shady characters prowling Hollywood Boulevard and Main Street. Elizabeth Short is trying to make it as an actress, even as an extra, but nobody gives her a break. The world is in a big transition. The city is crawling with soldiers and sailors and marines and airforce pilots, and natch the girls to entertain them in the cheap bars of downtown LA and Hollywood. This book doesn't flinch in portraying the hard life on the road for a pretty girl at the end of the Second World War. A dark, forboding feeling is over everything, behind the laughs and the flirtations. There is mystery and a sense of danger. The beginning of the book details the finding of the body of the Black Dahlia, and this is without peer in crime writing. This is a masterful work, and John Gilmore is a masterful writer. I cannot recommended this book highly enough. This is not a READ, it is an EXPERIENCE like watching a dark, strange ballet, full of shadow figures.

Everything has been said about this book, but I would love to add that it has introduced me to the darker, war-years Los Angeles that you only see in the older films noir. This is a remakrable book in scope and depth into the character and psychology of not only the "star", Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, but into the fringe characters as well. The transcript of the killer's depiction of the murder of the Black Dahlia is a nightmare. I am haunted by it. Anything else on this mysterious case falls short of John Gilmore's book. Get it, read it, and you'll never forget it.

One of the finest, real-life true crime books I have ever read. I am fascinated with the Black Dahlia case, and this book is the only one that is believable, credible, and an exciting read. John Gilmore is an incredible author; his writing about L.A. in the 1940's transports the reader into a different era, like getting into a time machine. Some readers may be shocked by the explicit crime and morgue photographs, but these graphically illustrate the misconceptions that pass as truth about the manner in which lovely Elizabeth Short met her death. I recommend this for all true crime readers and those interested in sensational, investigative journalism.

The classic account is John Gilmore's "Severed," which achieves the almost impossible feat of turning the very blankness of Elizabeth Short's brief life into a thing of riveting oddity. According to Gilmore, Short had a rare vaginal deformity that made the image of a sexually easy creature of the night nothing more than an image; if we accept this premise, the Dahlia story becomes the dark tale of a hapless mimic whose grasp of adult relations extended only to what they looked like in the movies. There's no reason not to credit Gilmore's fastidious account, in which one drifter kills another, then dies in a flea-pit hotel fire: This cruddy, despressing solution to the mystery is utterly consistent with the pathos of the world the Black Dahlia travelved through on her way to the big nowhere.

(Gary Indiana; May 25, 2003)

The inside story, the result of John Gilmore's arduous and incredible task of uncovering so much information and behind-the-scenes interviews. A near-impossible feat to have unearthed this amount of data about a person such as the young and beautiful Elizabeth Short, who lived such a mysterious and secretive existance. All the other armchair efforts fail where this book succeeds. Only someone with deep roots into the L.A. history and street scene, like Gilmore, could offer such a remarkable, indepth tale. Highly recommended.

My heart raced through this book, begging for some reward to be granted to poor Elizabeth Short, flower of the night. The beautiful, vain and desperate young woman, a child in so many ways, seeks a measure of love and acceptance, so desperate in her search to find some warm, sheltering little place in the sun. She is one of many young women "on the road" during that confusing, mixed-up history of post-war Los Angeles, and her dreams of motion picture fame and happiness take her to the sad, sad low point this book so devastatingly creates. The word-pictures are so vivid it is like watching a stark 1940's black and white movie. The photographs in this extraordinaty book are shocking and will not doubt disturb some readers, but otherwise a highly recommended read.