Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy

Product Information

We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination—in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Weirdly, there is one whom Powell very carefully avoids naming, even while providing more than enough information to identify her, so I'm not sure what's going on there. 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.

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? 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. Ellroy merges historical and literary sources with a tabloid sensibility,” writes Powell of Ellroy’s celebrated Underworld Trilogy, which began with American Tabloid (1995). In adopting more or less the same approach, Love Me Fierce in Danger delivers a biography that is entirely in keeping with a life that has been “mythologised, demythologised, and re-mythologised in the public eye, not least by the author himself”. Declan Burke 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. 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.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. Steven Powell’s in-depth biography of the crime fiction writer James Ellroy which is very well constructed and extremely meaty. He is able to dive down deep into Ellroy’s life from birth to where he is today, which includes the death of his mother, life with his father afterwards and the questionable living life in the streets and his trouble with crime before settling down to become the writer he is today. 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. 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 left one's the hospital, the right one's death. The right one steals your life while the left steals your breath. These hands are bad juju and the bad boogaloo, they're the teeth of the demon as he slides down the flue.”

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. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) 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).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. 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, but 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.

The astonishing sequel to Children of Time, the award-winning novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Powell's biography is wonderful, a must-read. . . . It is a testament to him and to his subject.”— Hedgehog Review

Advance Praise

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. 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. 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. 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?

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 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. 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. 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). Whatever we thought we knew about the Demon Dog of American Literature, we were wrong; Love Me Fierce in Danger is as revelatory as it is compelling, and a masterpiece of literary biography: James Ellroy deserves no less.”— David PeaceSteven 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.. 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.