Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy

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Love Me Fierce In Danger is a substantial work of literary scholarship. 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.

To understand the art that is created, one must look at the past to find what created the person. What motivates, what irritates, what scares and what makes the creator laugh. 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. Actions, reactions, events all make a mark, all leave a scar. To understand the Demon Dog, one must know the hell that forged him. To read James Ellroy is to see past effecting the present, screaming into the future and burning all in its path. To read a biography on the man is seeing the portrait of man, whose childhood left a mark, took his time to find himself, good to friends, bad to the women in his life, and a writer of skill and great ability. Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy by Steven Powell is a biography of a man, a study of a canon, and a life that has few parallels. Powell certainly gives us an impressively detailed account of the artist as a young drug abuser, burglar and sex-obsessed voyeur, a period that also includes the teenaged Ellroy acting tough with “his classroom Nazi act”. The early chapters, in fact, are the book’s strongest, and particularly when Powell investigates the young Ellroy’s relationship with his mother, Jean: “Years later, he candidly described his emotionally cold reaction to his mother’s murder: ‘I hated her. […] Some unknown killer just bought me a brand-new beautiful life.’” 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. This is a terrific book for James Ellroy lovers. It relies heavily on Ellroy’s memoir, My Dark Places, but Steven Powell has managed to find additional primary sources in writing this biography.

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I give Dr. Powell's biography of James Ellroy five stars with reservations. I give it five stars because I couldn't stop reading it and while I was reading it I neglected others of my responsibilities to continue reading. James Ellroy is by far my favorite modern writer. I've read everything he's published including his two autobiographical works and I was eager to discover what Dr. Powell had drummed up. He came up with a lot I didn't know but much of it I didn't really need to know either. I've heard of "warts and all" biography but why focus on the warts and neglect the really interesting stuff writers (the prodominant readers of biographies of writers) want to know? To paraphrase from Steven Powell's introduction to this well-researched, comprehensive and at times overwhelming biography of legendary crime.novelist James Ellroy, it's surprising no one had already written such a book. Perhaps would-be biographers felt Ellroy had already told his own story well enough in his two memoirs, MY DARK PLACES (one of the "Demon Dog's" best works) and THE HILLIKER CURSE (one of his few utterly terrible books). Steven Powell, a British academic, has spoken to dozens of whiplashed witnesses to the Ellroy story, as well as securing many hours’ worth of interviews with the demon dog himself. Powell convinced Ellroy he was the man to take on his biography after unearthing the hitherto unknown identity of the first husband of Ellroy’s mother Jean – a possible suspect

Love me Fierce in Danger is first a portrait of the artist as an energetic and trauma-tempered young dog, and then later—an elder hound both content with the considerable dent he’s made in the universe, and yet still today as a septuagenarian, not content to simply roll over… I have to say that this was quite the ride. At times I just had to set it aside because of some of the stuff that was described. I can say there are definitely a couple of his books I would like to read now. Steven Powell also gives us candid and insightful analysis into the origins and progression of both Ellroy’s well-hashed outrageous public persona, and the Demon Dog’s monastically Beethovian private life, with all the idiosyncrasies, private insecurities, coping mechanisms, and solitary circumspection that bind these two extreme polarities for James Ellroy just like everyone else.Love Me Fierce in Danger by Steven Powell is just the type of biography that is needed for a figure like James Ellroy, one that goes beyond just recounting a life and gets into understanding it. 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. One comes away from this new biography of Ellroy, however, with the sense that his public persona – rebarbative, showy, manic – is far from inauthentic. If there is a mild-mannered Wizard of Oz inside Ellroy’s booming façade, he is buried unreachably deep. Eventually Ellroy identified as the “Demon Dog” of American crime fiction, and even barked sometimes in public spaces! Since barking dogs can be totally annoying, some fans (and former lovers) understandably failed to find this persona very amusing. Speaking of dogs, by his own admission, Ellroy’s dog Margaret did not like him and often growled in his presence. The dog was a gift from his second wife, editor/novelist Helen Knode (m.1991-2006). This is a biography that should appeal to those who simply love biographies as well as those interested in Ellroy's work. Those interested in literary history will find a lot here to think about as well.

In between is a life of nearly nonstop chaos. Ellroy nearly died multiple times of alcohol and drug abuse before publishing a single book, let alone become the massively influential and successful giant of the genre he is now. Most of his fans already know this, as well as the story of his mother's murder, as it's all in MY DARK PLACES. Powell's work digs deeper into that material, but it doesn't feel like rehashing. 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). I read this book in galley form and was disappointed to come across several mistakes in usage and sentence structure. Some examples: absence of “whom” throughout the book, “The ruthless nature of magazine publishing entailed editors rarely stayed in post for long at GQ”, “…the nature by which he acquired it often underscored his fundamental emotional problems,” “…one of the melancholiest aspects of aging,” “the Marine Corp”, etc. My hope is that errors will corrected before publication. The early part of the book is completely wild as we are introduced to Ellroy's parents, who led similarly barnstorming lives before the murder of Ellroy's mother when he was 10 years old. The effect of this on the young Ellroy cannot be understated as even while he believes himself to be the next great crime writer he spends his years scraping by enough to fuel his addiction to alcohol.Love Me Fierce in Danger is a volume that will be scrutinized and studied for decades to come, and as such is a perfect omniscient companion to Ellroy’s 1996 autobiography… and while in that book, Ellroy gave us a relentless Virgil-like tour of his dark places, Steven Powell’s Love Me Fierce in Danger is thus a welcoming and warming torch to illuminate the walls of the underworld with introspective shadows…

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. 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.) You can also see the painful reverberations—far into adulthood—of Ellroy’s childhood traumas, which certainly include, but also go far beyond the well-tread territory of his mother’s brutal 1958 murder. While you might expect some degree of this from any biography, with James Ellroy, it’s even more prescient, because the generational ramifications of past misdeeds is a deliberately haunting, discomforting, and necessary motif in all the Demon Dog’s novels. How did a child, then adolescent, with this start in life end up a best-selling author? Love Me Fierce does an admirable job of showing the why of Ellroy’s passionate love for crime fiction, and how he taught himself to master the genre. The other primary storyline is Ellroy’s predictable difficulties with mood instability and with maintaining relationships with women. I’m a perfect example of that: Despite being a rabid Ellroy fan and devotee since I was 14 years old (27 years ago…), and even after reading literally hundreds of Ellroy interviews and related media throughout that time, there were elements of Love Me Fierce in Danger that surprised even me… No spoilers here, but there’s even a highly symbolic scene involving the Demon Dog as a then-infantile Demon Puppy that serves as a foreshadowing of Ellroy’s evisceration—and thus, humanizing—of Hollywood’s numerous dirty secrets in the decades to come…

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.' I have actually never read a James Ellroy novel, although I have seen several of the movie versions. 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. When Ellroy was just ten years old, his mother brutally murdered. 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. As Powell reveals, Ellroy’s mother’s murder and his upbringing in 1950s Los Angeles, always on the periphery of Hollywood, had a substantial influence on his writing. Powell plumbs the history of Ellroy’s life and family, including his mother’s mysterious first marriage eighteen years before her murder. 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.