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.

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. 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. 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.) 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.” 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.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 Powell's biography is wonderful, a must-read. . . . It is a testament to him and to his subject.”— Hedgehog Review I’m a perfect example of that: Despite being a rabid Ellroy fan and devotee since I was 14 years old (27 years ago…), and even after reading literally hundreds of Ellroy interviews and related media throughout that time, there were elements of Love Me Fierce in Danger that surprised even me… No spoilers here, but there’s even a highly symbolic scene involving the Demon Dog as a then-infantile Demon Puppy that serves as a foreshadowing of Ellroy’s evisceration—and thus, humanizing—of Hollywood’s numerous dirty secrets in the decades to come…

This is a brisk biography, written in short, snappy sentences of lean prose, reminiscent of James Ellroy’s own writing. At times, Ellroy’s life reads like one of his own books: the glamour of the golden age of Hollywood is vividly evoked, with parents who move in the orbits of the movie stars of the day. A divorce leads to hardship and an unhappy existence which culminates in his mother’s murder, an event that would define his entire life. 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. 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. 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. 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.)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 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. 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.