By Kilian Melloy

William J. Mann may best be known as the author of impeccably researched biographies of Hollywood legends like Marlon Brando, Barbra Streisand, William Haines, Elizabeth Taylor, and John Schlesinger. He’s also written historical fiction, taking as his subject the so-called “Biograph Girl,” Florence Lawrence, as well as having penned the classic “Boys Trilogy,” seminal queer novels The Men from the Boys, Where the Boys Are, and Men Who Love Men.

But there’s more to Mann’s bibliography. His true-crime book Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood delves into the unsolved 1922 murder of gay film producer William Desmond Taylor. To fully understand the crime, and its victim, Mann details a period of Hollywood history in which the movies were regarded as a menace and the world-famous dream factory was being used as an excuse for a censorious clampdown that eventually precipitated the notorious Hays Code.

Now Mann has returned to the true-crime genre with Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood, and once again his meticulous recollection of the crime’s context serves to illuminate the wider social environment in which the slaying took place. “The Black Dahlia” was the sensationalistic sobriquet given to Medford, Massachusetts native Elizabeth Short, a young woman who headed to Los Angeles in 1946 seeking a life far from her New England origins. Six months later, in January of 1947, Short’s mutilated body was discovered in a vacant lot in a residential neighborhood. As Mann documents, the nature of the mutilation (Short’s body had been cut, with surgical precision and anatomical know-how, into two pieces, among other desecrations), as well as the way it had been left nude in a place where it was sure to be noticed, suggested to the police that the killer was looking to make a statement.

Just as diabolical was the methodical process with which it seemed Short had been bound and tormented, with a Glasgow smile cut into her face — the corners of her mouths sliced into an elongated grimace with a sharp knife. When the newspapers caught wind that Short had been fond of wandering Hollywood Boulevard, had seemingly had a host of male admirers, and was called “The Black Dahlia” (a perhaps teasing reference to the then-recently released film The Blue Dahlia), a prurient legend about a man-crazy, hard-drinking wild woman was born.

Over the past eight decades the myth of The Black Dahlia has calcified, and countless books have proliferated about one of the most notorious unsolved crimes of the 20th century. Like all myths, however, this one has only tenuous ties to the truth. In the process of excavating the person interred beneath layers of legend, Mann has resurfaced a portrait of a young woman who hardly drank and, while perfectly willing to charm men into providing for her, was choosy about sexual companionship to the point of discouraging suitors with exaggerated stories about a tragically killed war hero fiancée and a hot-blooded boyfriend lurking on the margins.

William J. Mann chatted recently about the new book, the old stories, and finding the truth about Elizabeth Short’s life and death, as well as his novel theory about who her killer might have been.

Kilian Melloy: This is your second true crime book. Is this a genre in which you’ll be doing more work?

William J. Mann: I think, maybe. After doing Tinseltown, I really liked the genre because it allowed me to tell such a bigger story. Not just following one person’s life but following a community; not just the hunt for the solution to the crime, but also how the crime impacted the community, and what it tells us about that period of time, how it can relate to today.

Kilian Melloy: What specifically drew you to the story of Elizabeth Short, her murder, and the Black Dahlia myth that grew up around her?

William J. Mann: After Tinseltown, I wanted to go back and try another true crime. My editor said, “Well, you know, what’s another Hollywood crime?” I started suggesting various ideas, and none of them seemed right. And then he said, “Well, what about the Black Dahlia?” And I said, “Well, it’s been done, like, a thousand times.” And he said, “But has it ever been done correctly?”

That’s when I started digging into it. I realized that every previous attempt to tell this story had been about finding the killer. And I said, “What about the victim?” I realized that what had happened to Elizabeth Short, almost from the first week when her body was found, was that she was she was maligned and mischaracterized, and her own identity, her life, her name, got subsumed into this myth of the Black Dahlia, which has nothing to do with the human being that was Elizabeth Short. I went back to my editor and said, “Yeah, I think there is a story here, and I’m not going to necessarily solve the case. I think I’ll come up with some ideas about who may have done it, and definitely ideas of who did not do it. But mostly what I want to do is find her.” To me, solving the Black Dahlia case meant finding Elizabeth Short.

Kilian Melloy: There was a whole lot of sexist hokum that you had to cut through to get to the facts of the case.

William J. Mann: You can’t understand this story without understanding what was going on in these post-war years. Elizabeth Short didn’t live her life in a vacuum; she was part of a generation of young women who were saying, “I’m not going to stay in my hometown. get married like my mother, have babies, [and be] chained to the kitchen. I’m going to go explore.” To put it in context, during the war women saved the American economy by filling the jobs in the factories and in the offices because the men were fighting overseas. The men come home, and the women are expected to go back to the kitchens, and a lot of them weren’t willing to do that. Many women were moving into cities, they were delaying marriage, and they were navigating their own lives and their own sexual lives. That was going to result in a backlash. A lot of these women were slandered and demeaned in newspaper articles and church pulpits and in magazine articles. Single women in cities were seen as untamed and promiscuous, and as radical and dangerous. So, Elizabeth is moving in that world, and I think we can’t understand her life — but also, we can’t understand her death — without understanding that context.

Kilian Melloy: The case drew anti-queer hokum as well. There’s this whole fiction about Elizabeth Short being mixed up with murderous lesbians.

William J. Mann: Yeah, the lesbian theory is laughable when we look at it now, but it’s so deeply, deeply homophobic and misogynistic that it’s to the to the original detectives’ credit they never bought into it. But the newspapers played it up, and that, too, has seeped into the Black Dahlia myth, that she was lesbian or bisexual. There’s nothing wrong with that if she was, and maybe she was; there’s no evidence one way or the other. But she clearly was navigating her own course, which was threatening to a lot of people, and especially to a lot of men.

Kilian Melloy: With all the fiction you had to sort through and disregard to find the facts that you build your book on, did you find that you were using a different skill set than you would use in a biography of someone who may have contributed to the mythologizing of their life story?

William J. Mann: I think, ultimately, it’s the same set of tools. You have to bring a healthy skepticism to established stories. It’s not that they’re fake news, it’s simply that this is the way a story has been told, partly because people wanted the story told that way, and partly because that’s how people could comprehend the story in that period. These old narratives aren’t really telling the full story, so you have to do that in reconsidering the stories that have been told so many times and figure out why they were told in that way. When you do that, you can tell a new, fresh story that is based on facts and a clarity that a modern perspective can allow.

Kilian Melloy: You have a new theory about who the killer was, and you make a compelling case.

William J. Mann: I’m surprised that the individual I eventually deduce is the most likely killer was not named earlier. Why hasn’t there been a whole series of books about this person? To me, sorting through all the evidence, it’s pretty clear they are the most likely; I could exonerate everybody else except for this person. I don’t say I have solved this case; I think that would be very hubristic, because there is still a considerable amount of evidence that we don’t have access to. But it seems very clear that the individual that I come to fits all the boxes, fits that FBI formula of Why + How = Who. This the only individual who cannot be clearly exonerated by the evidence.

Kilian Melloy: In an interesting quirk of timing, there’s an “amateur sleuth” who claims to have unraveled the mystery of who killed Elizabeth Short, and they point at the same individual that you say you cannot exonerate.

William J. Mann: I suspect that this code breaker and I reached this conclusion independently, probably around the same time. I think his identification of this person as the killer of Elizabeth Short is well founded. However, he goes farther than I do, in claiming that this is definitely the killer, which I’m not prepared to do. I’m a historian. I’m a journalist. I work with facts, and I don’t want to make a grand claim until I’ve been through all of the files in the LAPD. As far as I know, he has not been able to do that himself, so I’m a little more reticent to be bold in that claim.

One of the concerns is, if we’re going to put forward these so-called solutions, we can’t base those solutions on the sensationalist journalism of the Los Angeles Examiner and Herald Express, or any of those newspapers that were just making up stories. We have to look through everything and make sure that what we’re claiming isn’t contradicted by something that’s in the district attorney files or in some of the files that we do have.

Kilian Melloy: Tinseltown almost became a mini-series, but that didn’t quite happen. Have there been any nibbles around adapting Black Dahlia, or has the new book renewed interest in Tinseltown?

William J. Mann: Yes, and no. There have been some inquiries about Black Dahlia. Tinseltown is being made into a documentary, which is pretty far along in production now, so that’s really encouraging. I still think it would be great as a scripted series. We had a great script for it, and then the studio we were attached to wasn’t able to move forward because of COVID, and then we were attached to Paramount, and then they weren’t able to do it. That’s what happens in Hollywood. But we’ll see. I’m just happy that the book seems to be getting a lot of pre-publication attention, and not so much for me, but because I got to really care about Elizabeth Short in doing this. I want to make sure that her story is known, and she’s rescued from this horrible myth that has been imposed on her for the last 80 years.

“Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood” is available at book stores and through online distributors, such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.