Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy

Product Information

Powell introduced his favorite Ellroy novels and book series offering detailed accounts related to his writing styles of combining fictional characterization with real life events, and his technique of limiting dialogue to reduce the manuscript content. If a name was dropped, a credible story followed—also included were easy to follow timelines, cultural events, trips abroad, literary agents, famous editors, celebrities and other insiders in the publishing and film industries. Ellroy generously donated his papers to the University of South Carolina (1999) he visits on occasion to lecture and update the archive. living a few doors away from her, so as to avoid the constrictions of co-habitation. But contentment may explain why, as Powell tactfully puts it, his most recent novels are “beginning to lose a sense of emotional power”.

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. 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 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. One can imagine that, in the future, somebody will draw on the material Powell has accumulated to produce a crazier, more poetic, more Ellroy-esque portrait, but this book is a highly enjoyable read in its own right, 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? 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…Dr. Powell reminds us on several occasions that Mr. Ellroy never finished high school. Mr. Ellroy did not apparently, based on Dr. Powell's information, attend any college classes. How then does an effectively uneducated person become the predominant male genius of American letters of his era? I don't know and neither will you when you finish reading Dr. Powell's extensive work.

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. 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… Certainly there is a demonic edge to Ellroy’s best work that makes most other crime novels, even the darkest, seem like comfort reading. He reportedly lives a more harmonious life nowadays, reunited with his second ex-wife, Helen, butYou 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. 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. 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…

For Ellroy fans and scholars both old and new, Love Me Fierce in Danger has plenty to spark and—more importantly—maintain your intrigue, even if you were certain you already knew all about James Ellroy’s exhaustively documented life… 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.) 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.

Advance Praise

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). 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. 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. 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. James Ellroy learned his craft somehow and his biography ought to give at least some hint on this actually important aspect of his art. He certainly didn't learn it in bed.

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. 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.' As I said in my review of Ellroy's latest novel (the disappointing, overcooked but compulsively readable WIDESPREAD PANIC), I'm a huge fan of his work. His fiction reveals more of who he is than almost any of his public statements. Powell understands this, and the time he spends critically examining Ellroy's major books is some of the biography's best material. (The look into the UNDERWORLD USA books is particularly insightful.) I'm not someone who's pored over all of Ellroy's work, but I was more than intrigued to find out more about his life from the little I knew and Steven Powell delivers a comprehensive account of a life well lived.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. 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? When Ellroy was eleven years old, his mother was brutally murdered and the perpetrator was never caught. For any child this would be a cataclysm but for Ellroy it only widened the existing schism in his life and personality. His father, Armand, hated Ellroy’s mother for divorcing him and slandered her mercilessly to their son before and after her death. Jean had had expectations of James, and during her weekday custody of the boy their life had rules and structure. Armand was an alcoholic who couldn’t keep a job and couldn’t be bothered giving structure to his son’s life. Having only one surviving parent, however unfit, James internalized much about his father including vengeful feelings toward his late mother. To deal with growing up virtually uneducated, unsocialized, enraged, and starved for attention, Ellroy created antisocial personae that would appear at times throughout his life. In junior high school, he “became” a Nazi and did his best to alienate Jewish students. He became a burglar, a shoplifter, and a peeping tom. 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. The “Dog” also contributed to his difficulties with women.