The Black Dahlia (1987) is a crime fiction novel by American author James Ellroy. Its subject is the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, California, which received wide attention because her corpse was horrifically mutilated and discarded in an empty residential lot. The investigation ultimately led to a broad police corruption scandal. While rooted in the facts of the Short murder and featuring many real-life people, places and events, Ellroy's novel blends facts and fiction, most notably in solving Short's crime when in reality her murder was unsolved. James Ellroy dedicated "The Black Dahlia", "To Geneva Hilliker Ellroy 1915-1958 "Mother: Twenty-nine Years Later, This Valediction in Blood"." The epigraph for "The Black Dahlia" is "Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, My first lost keeper, to love and look at later. -Anne Sexton."