This is a terrific book for James Ellroy lovers. It relies heavily on Ellroy’s memoir, My Dark Places, but Steven Powell has managed to find additional primary sources in writing this biography.
When Ellroy was eleven years old, his mother was brutally murdered and the perpetrator was never caught. For any child this would be a cataclysm but for Ellroy it only widened the existing schism in his life and personality. His father, Armand, hated Ellroy’s mother for divorcing him and slandered her mercilessly to their son before and after her death. Jean had had expectations of James, and during her weekday custody of the boy their life had rules and structure. Armand was an alcoholic who couldn’t keep a job and couldn’t be bothered giving structure to his son’s life. Having only one surviving parent, however unfit, James internalized much about his father including vengeful feelings toward his late mother. To deal with growing up virtually uneducated, unsocialized, enraged, and starved for attention, Ellroy created antisocial personae that would appear at times throughout his life. In junior high school, he “became” a Nazi and did his best to alienate Jewish students. He became a burglar, a shoplifter, and a peeping tom. In middle age and later, Ellroy would put on his “Dog” personality, talking “jive”, insulting various individuals and groups in foul-mouthed diatribes, especially while speaking in public or in other high stress situations. The “Dog” also contributed to his difficulties with women.
How did a child, then adolescent, with this start in life end up a best-selling author? Love Me Fierce does an admirable job of showing the why of Ellroy’s passionate love for crime fiction, and how he taught himself to master the genre. The other primary storyline is Ellroy’s predictable difficulties with mood instability and with maintaining relationships with women.
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.
Fans of L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, White Jazz, American Tabloid, and other books by James Ellroy will enjoy this book which is rich in detail and full of objective analyses of Ellroy’s professional development and personal life.