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. 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. 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. The book goes beyond that book in terms of time and events covered, and a more literary consideration of the man but as detailed and painstakingly researched as it is I didn't get the essence of the subject the way I did through Ellroy's own autobiographical piece - it is, as one might expect, a little dry. Sure, there's a lot of 'scandal' and dark matter, but it's told in such a matter of fact way (with an abundance of footnotes along the way) that I felt this is probably one more for the devoted Ellroy fan than a casual reader of his work or, indeed, anyone not already familiar with him. 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.

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. 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. 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? 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.

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 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. 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'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. 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”. That this is the first Ellroy biography is true; whether it offers a deeper understanding of the author than Ellroy delivered with his brutally honest memoir The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women (2011) is another matter.

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. 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.) 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. 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.

Advance Praise

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.

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. 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.”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. 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.' 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. 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. 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…

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. 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”.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.) 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). 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.