Patty Jenkins and Chris Pine’s I Am the Night Is a Retro Noir Thriller With Nothing New to Say

Notorious cold cases tend to splinter into competing narratives, each containing fragments of an elusive truth—and few have elicited theories as odd as those that surround the lurid 1947 murder of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, in Los Angeles. Orson Welles, Woody Guthrie, mob boss Bugsy Siegel and LA Times publisher Norman Chandler were all floated as suspects at some point. New books still appear every few years, offering novel takes on the picked-over evidence.

Notorious cold cases tend to splinter into competing narratives, each containing fragments of an elusive truth—and few have elicited theories as odd as those that surround the lurid 1947 murder of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, in Los Angeles. Orson Welles, Woody Guthrie, mob boss Bugsy Siegel and LA Times publisher Norman Chandler were all floated as suspects at some point. New books still appear every few years, offering novel takes on the picked-over evidence.