Just for a reference of what a black dahlia looks like. I think its interesting to see the almost black-rotten core dressed with deep red flowers. Maybe this will be a theme to come up later in the book; corruption/rotting from within.
Once again I found that the beginning ofThe Black Dahlia was very slow to start, being mostly about the boxing match and Blanchard/Bleichart’s training for the match. I feel that yes, it does set the scene, but it takes up too much time and develops too slowly for my taste. Why waste thirty pages basically talking about training, eating food, and stalking your rival? Anyways, I thought that Lee and Buckey hit it off immediately. They seem like two similar guys that understand one another, and understand how the police system they work for is scheming, since it seems they both get what they want (thanks to Lee). But I feel like they have some sort of underlying emotional connection there, I’m not sure yet.
The body of Short was described as having the sides of the mouth cut almost to the ears, something that I feel like everyone has seen before in the character of The Joker in The Dark Knight. I did a little research on the marking and it is dubbed a ‘Glasglow Smile’, apparently originating from Glasglow, Scotland, and used widely in English street gangs. I find this interesting because this marking, to find on the body of a young woman who was murdered, is an extremely gruesome picture. But, I feel like with its media adaptations in film, such as The Dark Knight, its gruesomeness is taken away from, because we associate it with The Joker, someone who has a Glasglow smile, but it has healed and does not look as bad as it probably would on a body of a young woman. Also the idea of forced happiness through pain and punishment, and eventually death.
