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On Tuesday, News and Chatter noted that James Ellroy's copies of the Steve Hodel book, Black Dahlia Avenger, appear to be for sale on eBay. In today's CityBeat, Ellroy elaborates a bit on his current thinking regarding the book, in which Hodel posits that his father killed Elizabeth Short and several other women.
Like your books, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, The Black Dahlia is an amalgam of fiction and nonfiction.Well, I didn’t get to look at the files; nobody is allowed to see the LAPD files. I read newspapers and microfilm and then embellished on that with fictional characters. I have no idea who killed her.
George Hodel?
It’s the best theory yet, and I endorsed it in my introduction to Steve Hodel’s book, but it’s unprovable. Most of Steve Hodel’s assertions about the various other women that George Hodel killed are bullshit, and the idea that one of his minions killed my mother is insane. His ideas got more and more tenuous, and he started culling facts to conform to this one thesis. I had no idea that George Hodel or Steve Hodel existed when I wrote the book.
Ellroy calls the forthcoming movie "a very interesting adaptation of my book."