The Red Dahlia: Part 1

The body of a young woman is dumped on the bank of the River Thames at Richmond. She has been severed in half at the waist, drained of blood, and her mouth slashed at the corners into a fixed smile, a beat-for-beat imitation of the 1947 Black Dahlia murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles. She is identified as Louise Pennel, about twenty-four, a would-be model last seen at a London nightclub. A red dahlia in her hair will give the case the name the press will use: the Red Dahlia.

DCI James Langton takes charge of the inquiry, and he and Anna Travis are working together again after the events of series 1, with the personal history between them left unresolved. It is Anna who establishes the copycat thread. A journalist, Richard Reynolds, has received anonymous typed letters linking the murder to the Black Dahlia case of 1947, and the letters give Louise the name the Red Dahlia. Reynolds is close enough to the case to be sent the killer's communications, and the series makes him both the case's channel to the killer and a figure Anna becomes involved with.

Louise's flatmate, Sharon Bilkin, tells Anna that Louise had answered an advertisement for a personal assistant and had been receiving gifts from a mysterious older man. That advertisement becomes the thread that leads to the second victim. Reynolds then receives a telephone call from someone claiming to be the killer and records it. The first part ends with the copycat pattern established, the press already involved, and the case still without a named suspect.

Its strength is the premise. Transplanting the Black Dahlia into a present-day London case, with the killer taunting the press in the original's style, gives the series its most watched and most distinctive opening. The killing is staged as a historical re-enactment, so the investigation is partly an act of reading, and the killer's letters bring the press into the plot as a participant rather than a chorus. The episode's subject is the way a crime becomes a media event: the killer taunts the press, the press names the victim, and the name, the Red Dahlia, is given by the tabloid imagination rather than by the police. La Plante's stated method is on show throughout, since the audience is given more of the evidence than the police team receive, and the puzzle is the viewer's to work at.

The weakness is that the copycat device is a familiar one, and the series' reliance on the Prime Suspect template had already drawn criticism; the idea of the victim as a media invention is asserted more than it is examined across the first part. It also ends, deliberately, without a suspect, which makes this the setup rather than the payoff. The Black Dahlia parallel sets up the case as an inherited text, since the killer is imitating a famous unsolved murder and the investigation has to read both crimes at once, and the three parts were stripped over three consecutive nights. At around 7.90 million it is the most watched episode of the whole run, with the 9pm slot won for ITV, and it is where the series' most notorious borrowing from a real case reaches the screen, with Reilly's Travis at her most assured. The Telegraph asked for more please; the Guardian was wry rather than hostile.