Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy

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Though also of the usual cultish behaviour – even as someone who's always been deeply suspicious of the organisation, I was taken aback by the sponsor who insisted that Ellroy ditch writing because it was distracting him from the all-important steps. Before long, the dad is dead too, his last words to his son the advice "Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.

While Powell doesn’t skimp on the sensationalism, the biography is at its best in exploring the development of Ellroy’s distinctive brutalist prose style. 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.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. And thereafter, a certain weariness creeps in, with the suspicion that the new prequel quartet might represent a surrender of sorts. During one induction, a Mexican drag queen started patting Ellroy's knee and saying playfully in an effeminate voice "Hi, I'm Peaches. Informed by interviews with friends, family, peers, and literary and Hollywood collaborators, as well as extensive conversations with Ellroy himself, Love Me Fierce In Danger pulls back the curtain on an enigmatic figure who has courted acclaim and controversy with equal zealotry. Obviously anyone with any awareness of Ellroy knows about his murdered mother, the similarities with the Black Dahlia case which set his trajectory from an early age, but his dad was just as much a character from the son's books, a foul-mouthed chancer so given to bullshitting that of course Ellroy came to disbelieve his stories of having been a war hero, and Rita Hayworth's business manager, even though both of those turn out to have been true.

His behaviour at one of his weddings prompted the pastor to warn the bride that the marriage would not last. When I saw James Ellroy in conversation at a literary festival a few years ago, the self-styled “demon dog” of American fiction largely ignored the interviewer and kept striding to the front of the stage to bellow at the audience.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.

Here he's described as "the most misogynistic man I ever met" by Ellroy, which is quite something from a man where one of his many break-ups came when his then partner failed to see the funny side after he "joked about using the names of his ex-girlfriends as dead hookers in his novels" (and can you guess what happened in the book he published after their split? 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. 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. 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”.But we also get everyone from Samuel Delany to Carrie Fisher, and even an indirect role for Janet Malcolm. Just as we're delving into an interesting look at how and why Ellroy's work is (mostly) not losing quality but allowing structure and formal experimentation to subsume emotional engagement, everything just kind of stops, Barring a few anecdotes and the explanation of how Powell pitched his biography to Ellroy, that's it. One comes away from this new biography of Ellroy, however, with the sense that his public persona – rebarbative, showy, manic – is far from inauthentic.