“[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.
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.’”
The Black Dahlia (1987), the first novel in the LA Quartet, finally cemented Ellroy’s reputation after the six books in six years that followed his debut, Brown’s Requiem (1981). It’s a fictionalised investigation into the murder of Elizabeth Short, savagely killed in Los Angeles in 1947: “Hovering allusively over the text is the presence of his mother Jean Ellroy. Ellroy dedicated the novel to her. The connection between two murdered women, Elizabeth Short and Jean Ellroy, was something that the author was readying himself to exploit.”
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As Ellroy starts to redefine the crime novel with a string of stone-cold classics, however, Powell’s book loses much of its fascination – there is little here by way of insightful critical analysis of the literary career, and much (the “voracious appetite” for women, various addictions, the Demon Dog posturing) that Ellroy’s fans will already know. Mind you, the fact that Ellroy views himself politically as a “Tory Mystic” was a new one on this fan, as is the news that the author once named a dog Margaret “in honour of his idol – Margaret Thatcher”.
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“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”.
