The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Love Me Fierce In Danger is the story of James Ellroy, one of the most provocative and singular figures in American literature. The so-called “Demon Dog of Crime Fiction,” Ellroy enjoys a celebrity status and notoriety that few authors can match. However, traumas from the past have shadowed his literary success. A highly enjoyable read… shrewd in its critiques of the work and jargon-free– an academic biography in the best sense. I suspect it will spoil the genre of literary biography for me for a while: can the life of any other living writer be anywhere near as horribly gripping?”—Jake Kerridge, The Daily Telegraph I know you are going to think I am strange, but I have never read anything Ellroy has written. I have been meaning to, but there are just so many books out there. Steven Powell obviously has a great understanding of this author and insight into his public and private life. Ellroy is quite an egmatic character and quite the womanizer. He wants to be heard and thinks that everyone is drawn to him. Powell touches on the subject of Ellroy's mothers murder and the turbulent life that seemed to follow Ellroy's childhood..

The truly revelatory stuff is found in the examination of Ellroy's years of fame. Though often staying sober after his hellish youth, his addictive personality manifests throughout his life in virtually every other aspect of it: spending, womanizing, chasing the trappings of fame in the media and at public appearances, and constantly aiming to portray himself as more.vulgar, caustic, right-wing and hypermasculine than he actually is (and he is in fact all of those things, but more nuanced underneath the bluster). Powell vows in the intro not to psychoanalyze Ellroy, but he doesn't have to: the behavior, whether it be acts of immense generosity and human kindness or cutthroat cruelty and verbal abuse, tells you all you need to know. Ellroy is an absolute mess in many ways, and it is inextricable from the power of his writing. (Ellroy is fairly honest to his biographer about most of his worst qualities; Powell presents the rest by amassing evidence from other parties.) In the 1970’s, homelessness, arrests/petty crimes and inhalant and alcohol abuse had taken a toll on Ellroy’s mental and physical health. As he turned his life around, he began writing. Ellroy sharpened his public speaking skills and dazzled AA members with his gifted storytelling abilities. This was a very interesting, although also somewhat off-putting, biography. 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. It was a difficult read in the sense that Ellroy is a difficult personality (both to capture in words and to like or warm to), as opposed to difficult because of the writing style, which is quite engaging, particularly given some of the subject matter.The author clearly had great access to the subject of his work (always a benefit for a biographer) and, of course, a pretty seminal work the subject had already written about his early life and, in particular the murder of his mother and the effect it had on him. To be sure, there are a lot of ibids in the reference, drawing a lot from 'My Dark Places.' Powell does not set out to expose Ellroy, who has always been perfectly happy to expose himself. If anything, you sense Powell feels safer discussing his subject’s sexual conduct than his right-wing (sometimes far-right) views, which are mostly attributed to an understandable hunger for attention in his youth. ‘With any feelings of anti-Semitism long behind him, Ellroy enjoyed taking in the culture at the Hillcrest’ (his local golf club in Los Angeles) is one of a number of sentences that sow doubt rather than eliminate it.

Steven Powell obviously has a great understanding of this author and insight into his public and private life. Ellroy is quite an egmatic character and qu Here is 'the skinny' (as the subject himself might put it) on one of the most charismatic and complex crime writers on the planet, affording insights into both the man and his craft. It's every bit as gripping and twisted as a James Ellroy novel. Dig it, cats. T he American crime writer James Ellroy, born Lee Earle Ellroy, chose his pen name because it was ‘simple, concise and dignified – things I am not’, a statement perhaps underscored by another name he likes being called, ‘Demon Dog’. We learn from Steven Powell’s sober new biography that an overseas publisher who wanted to translate Ellroy’s work (‘an almost unendurable wordstorm of perversity and gore,’ according to one critic) found that translators, deterred by his difficult language and right-wing sympathies, refused to do it.

Advance Praise

Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy ‘Take everything you thought you knew about me and leave it at the door’ James Ellroy told me shortly after I was appointed his biographer. Ellroy is a great self-publicist and his fascinating, sometimes harrowing, life has been well-documented, at least so we thought, in his two memoirs. But those books tell only a fragment of the story. For instance, Ellroy has written at length about the unsolved murder of his mother Jean Ellroy, but even he was unable to discover the identity of Jean’s first husband. I had one of those Eureka moments every biographer dream of when I found the marriage certificate of Jean and Easton Ewing Spaulding, and the story of their brief and mysterious marriage is central to the narrative of Jean Ellroy’s life in the early chapters of Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy. A rip-roaring look at the life and career of James Ellroy. It covers a lot of familiar ground but still manages to pull new insights about his childhood and early writing, and also adds some interesting context to his work and how it fits into the larger scope of American literature and Los Angeles. My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Bloomsbury Academic for an advanced copy of this biography on one of the outstanding and outlandish crime writers of the 20th Century.

While biographies are certainly always read to understand the subject we often come to them just wanting to know more about them. We usually feel we have some understanding and just want to know the details of the life, knowing our understanding will deepen (or change). In Ellroy's case even the understanding we have is cloudy, such that we hope a biography, in recounting the life, will bring an understanding into better focus. For me, that is what Powell accomplishes here. I'm not sure someone who hasn't experienced what Ellroy has can fully understand him, I'm not sure he understands himself (do any of us?), but after reading this I feel like I can see where he is coming from and what he might, unconsciously or not, be trying to do. The beginning is very harrowing and very frank and honest which I truly applaud it for. This is warts and all and does not shy away from some very difficult subject matter that is his life but as we move forward to his writing career we are probably getting the most in-depth character study about the man and his gift to the world. Away from the books, well, where do you begin? Powell avoids praise or blame but makes clear there is no shortage of grounds for the latter. Ellroy broke into the homes of girls in his class at high school to steal their underwear. Fame was no corrective. A woman he dated in 1986 disliked his jokes about using ‘the names of his ex-girlfriends as dead hookers in his novels … These were often the same women he had dedicated novels to when the relationship was going well.’ A few years after she and Ellroy had gone their separate ways, she duly found her name given to a murdered prostitute in LA Confidential (1990). James Ellroy had a different name at birth, one that sounded like a political assassin, or a hayseed. Ellroy's parents divorced early, with a lot of enmity, and Ellroy spent time between both parents, a mom that tried to raise him, and a father who spent more time railing on the shrew that he married. Ellroy's mother was murdered, suspect unknown, and Ellroy went to live with his father, a minor Hollywood flunkie, who had seen better days, and spent more time on his couch then providing or caring for his son. Young James loved to read, stealing books when he had to to keep up with his voracious habit. Crime and crime stories were his favorite, books that later helped him when he started breaking into houses for thrills. After the death of his father, drinking nearly killed Ellroy, but golf, AA, books and a need to write gave him something to live for. Starting slow he wrote what he knew, crime, men failing and Los Angeles. Slowly he found his groove, removing words, mining history and people, real and not-so-real, to tell his tales, and success, and madness soon followed.

Reviews

he sees as inimical to Ellroy’s work: “The more friction and unresolvable conflict that existed in his personal life, the more visceral his art became.” Thanks to Netgalley, and Bloomsbury Academic for the Kindle Version of the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Love him or loathe him, it is impossible to ignore James Ellroy’s impact on crime fiction. Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, by Steven Powell, makes a good case for the historical significance of his influence, not just on the crime genre but literature more generally. The first biography of one of America’s most controversial contemporary crime writers, researched and written with his full cooperation, Love Me Fierce in Danger also contributes a wealth of material and insight into Ellroy’s private life and personal struggles. I am tempted to say that it includes far more detail than I wanted to know. But that that would be a complete lie. I wanted to know it all, as I am damn sure many of you do, too. When it comes to James Ellroy, [Powell] is the go-to expert who plays sleuth to the inventor of many an L.A. sleuth. . . . The same obsessive thread that runs through all of Ellroy's work also weaves kinetically through Powell's prose. In this latest book, he reveals nuances of the epic writer's life and process that only an Ellroy expert can.”— Brooklyn Rail Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman