Love Me Fierce in Danger

The Life of James Ellroy

By: Dr Steven Powell

Narrated by: Jeff Harding

Bloomsbury presents Love Me Fierce In Danger by Steven Powell, read by Jeff Harding.

WINNER OF 2024 EDGAR ALLAN POE AWARD (BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL BOOK)
THE TELEGRAPH'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE H.R.F KEATING AWARD FOR BEST BIOGRAPHICAL/CRITICAL BOOK

"As gripping and twisted as a James Ellroy novel." – Ian Rankin

"A masterpiece of literary biography." – David Peace

The first critical biography of a titan of American crime fiction.

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.

©2023 Steven Powell (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

Powell brings out the conflicting sides of Ellroy’s personality tactfully and sympathetically — without ever taking his eye off the truth … [It] has all the pace, twists and shocks of a good crime novel. (Mark Sanderson)

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? (Jake Kerridge)

Steven Powell’s brilliant, unflinching biography reveals how the novelist’s obsessions have their roots in the extraordinary experiences of his childhood and early years … Powell scrupulously chronicles Ellroy’s hectic career: his compulsive womanising; lapses in sobriety; near nervous breakdowns; and attention grabbing performances as the self-styled ‘Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction’… According to his ex-wife, Helen Knode: ‘James lives life like he was shot out of a cannon.’ This gripping, illuminating biography not only throws light on just what she meant by that. It also reveals why he does so. (Nick Rennison)

Sober … Powell’s unruffled approach is a shrewd way of tackling Ellroy’s sensational life and imagination. (Anthony Cummins)

[A] stark, revealing account of [Ellroy’s] life. (Martin Chilton)

An essential purchase for anyone interested in modern American crime fiction, couched in prose that is as lively as its uncompromising subject. (Barry Forshaw)

Must read/listen for Ellroy fans, curiosity seekers, and Noir genre enthusiasts

Steven Powell triumphs with this fascinating tour of the life, loves, art, and times of the ‘Demon Dawg” of LA Noir—James Ellroy. Like a rollercoaster ride—once you’re strapped in, there’s no exit.

Although not mentioned by Powell, his biography makes clear Ellroy’s line of literary descent from such “gonzo” writers as Henry Miller, Charles Bukowsky, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Ellroy’s public shock persona and dazzling terse “beat” prose style both attract and repel. Where “his-story” becomes “piss-story.” Where all that is gritty, grimy, seedy and slimy about historic L.A. is bodied forth in all of its smog-wrapped glory. Where Ellroy is still fighting the 1831 Battle of Cahuenga Pass— his pen as his sabre—the combatants now crooked cops and America’s flotsam and jetsam washed ashore at the continent’s edge.
Disclaimer: Ellroy’s mother was once married to my maternal grandfather Easton Ewing Spaulding. Catherine Nealy Judd

Five stars with reservations

You’ve heard of “warts and all.” This bio is primarily warts. The fact is, most readers interested in this book will have already read Ellroy’s books and the synopses here are redundant. We already know JE is nuts. What we don’t know, and I still don’t know, is how an author which the biographer reminds us on a few occasions, never finished high school, learned to write so brilliantly. What texts did he study? His complex novels are outlined over 100 pages. Where did he learn to outline such intricate stories never having attended a college writing course? As a student of Ellroy’s work these are the things I’m interested in. They are even more a mystery to me now than they were when I eagerly took up this volume. I guess it’s useful to know that the sources of many of his characters are his former lovers but I guessed as much. I wish this book focused much more on Ellroy’s prodigious work than on his chaotic personal life. That said, I frequently found myself sneaking away from my own responsibilities to spend a little more time in the world of James Ellroy, hence the Five Stars. It’s not everything I wanted but it is still very good.

The journey of James Ellroy

This first ever full-length biography of James Ellroy is easily far more than just a simple rehashing of the Demon Dog’s well-documented life. Just as Ellroy himself has described Jack Webb’s The Badge as a type of Rosetta Stone for understanding the pathogenesis of Ellroy’s work, you can view Love Me Fierce in Danger the same way… In fact, the biography’s narrative thrust manages to accurately capture and reflect the many sides of its ornate and enthralling subject.
Like the Demon Dog himself, Love Me Fierce in Danger is by turns hilarious, shocking, compassionate, hopeful, uncompromising, optimistic, determined, and—ultimately successful at the ambitious task of detailing an equally ambitious and epic life.
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.
Love me Fierce in Danger is first a portrait of the artist as an energetic and trauma-tempered young dog, and then later—an elder hound both content with the considerable dent he’s made in the universe, and yet still today as a septuagenarian, not content to simply roll over…
For Ellroy fans and scholars both old and new, Love Me Fierce in Danger has plenty to spark and—more importantly—maintain your intrigue, even if you were certain you already knew all about James Ellroy’s exhaustively documented life…
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…
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.
With Love Me Fierce in Danger, Steven Powell—the foremost global expert on all things Ellroy—has given us an exhilarating examination of a complex and brilliant man scarred and then sculpted by tragedy, who has created his career—and indeed his whole adult life—with the same unrelenting pursuit Ellroy employs in skillfully weaving together his byzantine and symphonic fictional narratives… Indeed, as Steven Powell masterfully demonstrates, creation and performance are lifelong necessary tactics of survival for Ellroy.
Love Me Fierce in Danger is a volume that will be scrutinized and studied for decades to come, and as such is a perfect omniscient companion to Ellroy’s 1996 autobiography… and while in that book, Ellroy gave us a relentless Virgil-like tour of his dark places, Steven Powell’s Love Me Fierce in Danger is thus a welcoming and warming torch to illuminate the walls of the underworld with introspective shadows…
Love Me Fierce in Danger even respectfully acknowledges its subject’s lifelong fascination with mysticism, as the biography concludes on a mystical note evocative of a key piece of wisdom from Ellroy’s novel Blood’s A Rover: “Take note of what you are seeking, for it is seeking you…”

NOTHING NEW TO HEAR HERE

I expected more. I expected a [relevant] worthwhile look behind the mask of the “Dog.”