Amok Books – förlag

The Black Dahlia murder hit post-War Los Angeles like a bombshell . . . an impenetrable mystery—the haunting crown jewel of LAPD’s “unsolved” murders. Even before her savage death, beautiful 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet and nightclub habitué, was known as the Black Dahlia—now a magnetic icon in American pop culture, an almost mythical symbol of noir Hollywood. In this expanded edition, John Gilmore plumbs the dark core of this terrifying story that he argues can never be truly solved. Here is the real Elizabeth Short—the enigmatic Black Dahlia. Kindle edition includes exclusive new photos.“The best book on the Black Dahlia — in fact, the only reliable book.” — Colin Wilson“The most satisfying and disturbing conclusion to the Black Dahlia case.” — David Lynch.

Legendary noir author John Gilmore takes the reader on a mad, tumultuous all-night drive without remorse or pity, through the high and low life of Hollywood and the City of Angels. This is the true-crime capstone to a celebrated collection of works, a blood-and-semen-soaked noir trail of all-night diners, nightclubs and cheap motels. Gilmore delivers a relentless panorama of sex, violence and death in five raw chronicles of SoCal sickness: • Porn legend John Holmes and untouchable LA crime and drug impresario Eddie Nash—the unvarnished story of the sex-and-coke-laced Wonderland murders. • Hollywood’s fallen angel Barbara Payton—hell-bent on descending from Movie Star Sexpot to the gutters of Heartbreak and Vine. • From gorgeous jailbait Sunset Boulevard hooker to San Quentin’s gas chamber—the saga of the infamous “Ice Blonde” murderess Barbara Graham. • Highway hitchhike-killer Billy Cook unleashes his remorseless hate for the whole human race in one of the 20th century’s most grisly crimes. • “King of Western Swing” and early TV “Fiddlin’ Cowboy” icon Spade Cooley rides a nightmare trail of madness, paranoia and murder. "John Gilmore is one of America’s natural-born gifts to literature. His books aren’t just inspiring and wicked by-products of genius: they’re miracles. . . . He’s the best ever.” — Gary Indiana

Live Fast, Die Young: Rembering the Short Life of James Dean is a first — revealing James Dean from the inside out by someone who knew him intimately, in more ways than one. John Gilmore hung out with Dean during the early days in New York, and again in Hollywood when Dean starred in his first movie, East of Eden. They pounded the pavements of Broadway together, raced motorcycles, had sex with the same women (and compared notes), experimented with gay sex, and tried to make love to another. “We were bad boys playing bad boys while opening up the bisexual sides of our separate personalities . . .” One sex scene between the two is played out in black leather to the music of Edith Piaf. “The sex was a game,” Gilmore writes. “Jimmy was obsessed with riding the black ship to hell, and for that quick time I was on board with him.” Dean found in the young Gilmore a “kind of unthreatening waste basket” into which he confided, dumping his chaotic, erotic and crazy ideas. “We enjoyed poetry and bullfighting, bongo drums, booze, and girls; knew the same crummy friends and sleepless, searching nights.”Dean’s insights into his brilliant Broadway success and the films that followed are revealed through Gilmore’s story as are Dean’s hatred of his disapproving father; his intimacy with his mother and their secret games that engendered Dean’s sexual confusion in Hollywood; Dean’s obsession with death; and the posthumous explosion of the legend. Through letters, diaries, tape-recorded conversations with the actor, and private remembrances by those closest to him, Gilmore constructs a never-before-seen portrait of the star.

A powerful chronicler of the American Nightmare through his gripping examinations of near-mythic Southern California murders (the Black Dahlia, Tate-La Bianca), John Gilmore now draws upon his personal experiences to turn his sights on our morbid obsession with Celebrity and the ruinous price it extracts from those who would pursue it. With caustic clarity and 20/20 hindsight, Gilmore unstintingly recounts his relationships with the likes of Janis Joplin, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda, Jean Seberg and Lenny Bruce on the way up and at the peaks of their notoriety. In baring his role in James Dean''s attempts to push the bounds of sexual experimentation, Gilmore explores the actor''s legendary fascination with speed and death. With hip, vivid prose, Gilmore describes his illuminating and often haunting first-hand encounters with Hank Williams, Ed Wood, Jr., Briggite Bardot, Sal Mineo, Eartha Kitt, Charles Manson, Jayne Mansfield, Vampira, Steve McQueen and many other denizens of the 20th century''s dubious Pantheon.