Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy

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A particular constellation of factors in publishing and movie making in the 1980s and 1990s, favoured Ellroy and he took full advantage of them.

Powell, who has written two previous critical works on Ellroy, interrogates in detail what has effectively been the three writing careers of Ellroy: his published fiction and non-fiction books, his script writing work for Hollywood – which is far more substantial than I had realised – and his work as a columnist for GQ m Their blood flows in the veins of the boy who breaks into houses to steal the pants of the girls he’s got crushes on, who graduates to addiction and homelessness before fate takes him on a different path. Starts a bit slow, but takes off and blitzes the reader with more inside publishing dirt and Ellroy arcana than I could have hoped for. When Ellroy was eleven years old, his mother was brutally murdered and the perpetrator was never caught.

Ellroy started to read crime fiction as a boy in 1950s Los Angeles when his estranged father gave him Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books to read while looking after him at weekends. It all helped Ellroy secure the kind of coverage that propelled him into the top rank of American novelists; Powell reports Ellroy’s delight when Time chose American Tabloid as 1995’s best novel, ahead of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater. In middle age and later, Ellroy would put on his “Dog” personality, talking “jive”, insulting various individuals and groups in foul-mouthed diatribes, especially while speaking in public or in other high stress situations. How then does an effectively uneducated person become the predominant male genius of American letters of his era?

The crime went unsolved, and her death marked the start of a long and turbulent road for Ellroy that has included struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, and jail time. His father, Armand, hated Ellroy’s mother for divorcing him and slandered her mercilessly to their son before and after her death. Powell's account is never less than captivating as there is usually some tumult around the corner in Ellroy's life or he has produced something wonderful that Powell is unafraid to discuss at length to provide insight into the work and the man. Just as Ellroy himself has described Jack Webb’s The Badge as a type of Rosetta Stone for understanding the pathogenesis of Ellroy’s work, you can view Love Me Fierce in Danger the same way… In fact, the biography’s narrative thrust manages to accurately capture and reflect the many sides of its ornate and enthralling subject. James] Ellroy’s life is the great untold story of American literature,” says Steven Powell of his “first full-length biograph”’ of “the self-styled Demon Dog”.Which largely seems to leave him with more time and energy for chasing women instead, not least because at this point AA meetings were apparently hotbeds of hooking up. Powell, who has written two previous critical works on Ellroy, interrogates in detail what has effectively been the three writing careers of Ellroy: his published fiction and non-fiction books, his script writing work for Hollywood – which is far more substantial than I had realised – and his work as a columnist for GQ magazine in the 1990s, which in itself was quite significant. I received this book from NetGalley and the publisher but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

He gave back his publishers his advance for The Black Dahlia on the condition that they spend it on the book’s publicity and double their own marketing budget for the novel. Ellroy’s life is the stuff of his fiction (murdered mother, tortured teenage years, alcohol and drug addiction, obsession with women) and this book reads like one of his novels, one with a particularly damaged protagonist. It is incredibly detailed, not only about Ellroy's life, but also about each of his major books, with quite lengthy descriptions of the plots of each. I knew he had a reputation that was somewhat volatile, but had no idea of the depth and breadth of that volatility throughout the course of his lifetime. In adopting more or less the same approach, Love Me Fierce in Danger delivers a biography that is entirely in keeping with a life that has been “mythologised, demythologised, and re-mythologised in the public eye, not least by the author himself”.This entry was posted in 1990s American crime films, Crime fiction, Crime film, James Ellroy, Neo Noir, Noir fiction and tagged James Ellroy, LA Confidential, Love Me Fierce in Danger The Life of James Ellroy, Steven Powell. Initially he worked under the spell of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, the sales of which Ellroy eyed keenly. If there is a mild-mannered Wizard of Oz inside Ellroy’s booming façade, he is buried unreachably deep. Powell paints a vivid picture of the provocative author’s life, offering a deeper understanding of his work. I have actually never read a James Ellroy novel, although I have seen several of the movie versions.