The source novella for "The Blue Gardenia" was written by Vera Caspary and entitled "The Gardenia": the eventual amendment of the film's title to "The Blue Gardenia" would be an attempt to attract filmgoers by reminding them of the highly-publicized unsolved Black Dahlia murder of 1947. "The Gardenia" first appeared in the February–March issue of "Today's Woman" magazine: however the film rights for the novella had been acquired almost a full year earlier, it being announced in April 1951 that its filmation - purportedly entitled "Gardenia" - would be a production of the Howard Welsch-helmed Fidelity Pictures, who originally negotiated with Dorothy McGuire to play the female lead, which was subsequently offered to Linda Darnell, Joan Fontaine, and Margaret Sullavan (had Sullavan played the film's female lead, "Blue Gardenia" would have been her final movie rather than "No Sad Songs for Me" in 1950; Sullavan, who died in 1960, would have three television roles in the 1950s, one of them later than 1953).