In “Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy,” Steven Powell has produced an uneven account of a writer who is equal parts a profane and politically incorrect performance artist and a talented novelist. The reader comes away from this at times frustrated by the book’s timidity. It reads like the volatile novelist was sometimes looking over Powell’s shoulder as he typed.
Powell recycles information from Ellroy’s often self-indulgent, occasionally confessional autobiographies; in one, “My Dark Places,” he confesses that as a child, he wished his mother dead (“I hated and lusted for her”) and it would be granted when an unknown assailant raped and murdered her in 1958 — a crime unsolved to this day — when he was 10. Years later, he still seems angry at her when he coldly and clinically describes her murder: “It was sex gone bad. They were in his car down lover’s lane and it was her time of the month.”
In another memoir, “The Hilliker Curse,” he sets out to chronicle his pursuit of strong women, but the book soon descends into Ellroy’s primary focus of how, when he was living with a permissive father, and later as a homeless drug addict, he burglarized homes to sniff women’s underwear. Indeed, in interviews he prefers talking about this rather than the craft of being a writer. When he does wander over to his profession, it is merely to proclaim himself the greatest novelist since Dostoyevsky.
As in interviews, the net
