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About the Book
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.
When Ellroy was ten years old, his mother was brutally murdered. The crime went unsolved, and her death marked the start of a long and turbulent road for Ellroy that has included struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, and jail time. In tracing his life and career, Steven Powell reveals how Ellroy’s upbringing in LA, always on the periphery of Hollywood, had a profound and dark influence on his work as a novelist. Using new sources, Powell also uncovers Ellroy’s family secrets, including the mysterious first marriage of his mother Jean Ellroy, eighteen years before her murder. At its heart, Love Me Fierce in Danger is the story of how Ellroy overcame his demons to become the bestselling and celebrated author of such classics as The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential.
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.
My Review
I confess upfront: I have actually never read a James Ellroy novel, although I have seen several of the movie versions (and YES, I know how lame that sounds, but it’s all I’ve got). 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.
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.
His career spanned a lot of significant time periods, in cinematography and publishing, and that made for a very interesting backdrop for the biography. Pair that with the shifts in attitudes toward crime, perpetrators, and victims in that same time frame, and the result does intrigue me. I’m still not sure if I will wind up reading Ellroy after this book, but I definitely feel like I have a solid grounding as to what drove the man to develop the type of persona he did. And while that grounding doesn’t exactly endear him to me, it does intrigue me enough that it may lead me to one or more of his major works.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.
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