The bright lights of Hollywood Boulevard took on a shimmering radiance, neon burning in the coolness of dusk, the hard, unpleasant edges of an ugly one-industry town blurred into blemish-free beauty. Like an aging screen queen with a great makeup artist, a gauze-draped key light, and a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, Hollywood didn’t look half bad.

Continuing my random-order reading of the novels in Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller historical mystery series, I came to Angel in Black, his treatment of the Black Dahlia murder.

1947 finds Nate Heller newly married and honeymooning in Los Angeles. He’s riding along with a newspaper reporter when they follow a police radio call and become the first two people (after the murderer) to see the naked, bisected female corpse that will soon become a national sensation.

Heller, a former cop and well-known private eye, is invited by the chief investigator to help out. He agrees, for reasons he keeps secret.

The fact is, he knows this girl. He had a brief affair with her a while back in Chicago, when he thought the woman he’s now married to had left him for good.

And even more recently he received a phone call from her, hinting that she was carrying his child and needed money for “an operation.”

Cops don’t like coincidences, so Heller is highly motivated to uncover the killer before the police discover his personal connection. In the course of this effort, he even brings in his old buddy Eliot Ness.

Of course the murder actually remains unsolved to this day. But Collins works out a complicated scenario, probably about as good as anybody else’s theory. Though it’s weakened by involving a fictional culprit.

As always, Collins’s writing is first rate, and he and his researchers have done the dog work to make possible an evocation of a time and place that you can almost smell. That’s perhaps the greatest pleasure of this series.

One item of particular interest to our readers will be the discovery that Nate Heller (perhaps in spite of whatever his author’s opinions may be—I have no idea) is adamantly opposed to abortion. At least when it involves his own baby.

Recommended, with the usual cautions for language, sexual content, and the kind of gore that this particular story can’t avoid.