Raymond Chandler's novel is told by its main character, Philip Marlowe, a private detective in Los Angeles. In this story he is hired by a rich man, General Sternwood, to find his missing and wayward daughter, Carmen. When he does, he discovers that she is mixed up with a pornographer, Arthur Gwynne Geiger, who runs a rare book store while also selling photographs and blackmailing rich girls like the one Marlowe seeks to protect. The blackmailer is murdered and the girl suspected, but Marlowe proves who actually did it with the help of the girl's older sister, Vivian.
This novel is from the hard-boiled school, a style of mystery novel which takes a dark view of human nature, which expresses themes in terms of violence, and with what is generally a cynical point of view. The narrator is often the detective himself, as is the case in this novel, and the consciousness of marlowe is the filter through which every scene is depicted. The style was pioneered in Dashiell hammett's The Maltese Falcon, but that novel is told in the third person. The two most interesting things about the novel are the consciousness of Marlowe, a cynical man who tries to have ideals in a world where ideals are not favored, and the setting, for Chandler makes Los Angeles in the late 1940s a major character in the novel. Because the story is in the first person, we see everything from marlowe's point of view and with his running commentary on what it means to him, so the book remains interesting because Marlowe himself is interesting.
James Ellroy here fictionalizes a real Los Angeles murder mystery from the late 1940s, the murder of a woman who was dubbed by the newspapers the Black Dahlia. This case was never solved. James Ellroy responds in this book to the mystery of Elizabeth Short, the real woman who was called the Black Dahlia and whose cut-up body was found in an empty lot in South L.A. almost 50 years ago. Ellroy evokes the time and place ve...