Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy

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There are many incredible stories in this biography and all are dealt with admirable objectivity and lack of judgement. If you need any further convincing, I did a lengthy interview with Powell for the US site CrimeReads, which you can read in full here. It relies heavily on Ellroy’s memoir, My Dark Places, but Steven Powell has managed to find additional primary sources in writing this biography. The exploration of Ellroy’s career is supplemented by detail and insight into Ellroy the person, based on conversations with the man himself, and friends and colleagues.

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. And if nothing else, even the film we got stands out as a better idea than most of Ellroy's other screen incarnations – the true crime film made by Troma sounds especially misjudged. The crime went unsolved, and her death marked the start of a long and turbulent road for Ellroy that included struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, and jail time. These hands are bad juju and the bad boogaloo, they're the teeth of the demon as he slides down the flue. For the biographer, there’s always going to be a tightrope balance between keeping the subject on side (and risking sanitising the biography to the point of unrecognisable sainthood) or there’s the side of the hellish, unvarnished truth that threatens to make an enemy of its subject.We usually feel we have some understanding and just want to know the details of the life, knowing our understanding will deepen (or change). Powell plumbs the history of Ellroy’s life and family, including his mother’s mysterious first marriage eighteen years before her murder.

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. Without question, the tragedy of Jean Ellroy’s unsolved murder in El Monte, California, (1948) has greatly influenced her son’s life and literary career beyond comprehension. A biographer might have to go deep, past where the creator wants others, including themselves to look, to even find facts about people close to the creator, that they didn't even know about.

Eventually Ellroy identified as the “Demon Dog” of American crime fiction, and even barked sometimes in public spaces! And because Ellroy is a bullshit artist par excellence, and it has been hard in the past to take anything he says at face value, it is great to have the detail of his life so rigorously backgrounded and fact checked. I would much rather know the process by which Ellroy developed his prodigious vocabulary than the number of women he's cohabitated with and why the relationships failed.