COLIN WILSON IS RIGHT!

Severed is by far the best book on the Black Dahlia, in fact, as Colin Wilson says, it is the only reliable book.Not only was it the first nonfiction book ever published on the subject, but John Gilmore, having spent years researching the case, it is also one of the most exciting and penetrating true crime books ever written. The few who call it "junk" and etc, are not grasping the essence of what this book is all about. This is a work of literature, of history, a deep excavation of L.A. as it was during the classic era!

Too fictional

Although Gilmore's suspect Wilson is very believable, especially his state of mind in the (missing) tapes, and what would normally be the criminal psychopathology behind this kind of depraved crime, there are too many holes. E.g., he had no car to move the body, and there is conveniently no mention of whether Wilson's fingerprints were ever compared with those from the Bauerdorf lightbulb. I've read everything I can get my hands on about this fascinating murder, and I'm sticking with the Dr. Hodel theory.

Junk......pure junk!

After years of reading "true crime" books , I have learned to appreciate the way in which a good author can take a marginally interesting crime story and turn it into a frantic page turner ...one you just can't put down until the last page is finished. Another skill a good author posseses is to find at least some redemptive quality in an otherwise tragic crime. In "Severed" , Mr. Gilmore manages to do the exact opposite. Here is a crime that has all of the elements ripe for a scary , gripping ride through the seedy world of 1940's LA. Instead in turns out to be a jumbled nearly incomprehensible cure for insomia. The narrative is so disjointed .....every few paragrahs I found myself backtracking to see if I could figure out what was going on or who the author was talking about. All the book seems to consist of are questionable "accounts" from every joe that ever gave Elizabeth Short a lift or bought her a drink ,randomly spliced together in no partciular order, coupled with some stories of competing detectives.....blah , blah.