The Life and Legacy of James Ellroy

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Steven Powell’s just released book Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is an ambitious biography of one of American crime fiction’s most influential and controversial figures. Powell, an Honorary Fellow in the English Department at the University of Liverpool, UK, wrote the book with Ellroy’s cooperation. It is a sustained piece of literary scholarship that combines an in-depth analysis of the author’s multifaceted career with deep insights into his personal history and life. 

AN: This is your fourth book on the writer James Ellroy. What is it about him as an author and literary figure that you find so interesting and worthy of a fully-fledged literary biography?

SP: With each previous book, I’d unearth new material and nuggets about Ellroy’s life that were not previously in the public domain. A paradox began to emerge. Ellroy is a skilled and energetic self-publicist who has gone over key moments of his life-story, such as his mother Jean Ellroy’s unsolved murder, many times. But there were just as many moments in his life, if not more, that he hasn’t talked about. His two memoirs, My Dark Places and The Hilliker Curse, leave decades of his life unaccounted for. I began to realise I could tell his complete story in a literary biography which unearthed new material on Ellroy and put together disparate material on him into a reasonably linear narrative. I firmly believe that love or loathe him, Ellroy is a titan of American literature, of the same historical importance as Hemingway, Mailer of Vidal. That’s a story that needs to be told.

AN: How would you analyse Ellroy’s impact on the crime fiction genre? You write early on in Love Me Fierce in Danger that ‘Ellroy’s life is the great untold story of American literature’, which obviously infers that his influence goes far beyond a single genre. 

SP: Joyce Carol Oates described Ellroy as ‘the American Dostoevsky’. Ellroy was instrumental in bridging the gap between the crime genre and literary fiction. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett might be considered major figures in American literature now, but they never achieved that distinction in their lifetime: Ellroy has. Through his willingness to embrace experimentation in prose and plotting Ellroy created his own Ellrovian style which readers recognise, and authors emulate. His fierce competitiveness means he is still striving for greatness in his third act, even if it sometimes alienates his readers. Take a novel as divisive as Perfidia. Ellroy conducted a huge amount of research into the outlining and planning of this novel which portrays, in minute detail, day-to-day life in wartime Los Angeles. The result was both brilliant and challenging, some might say maddening, but unlike anything else I have read in modern American crime fiction.

AN: As I was reading Love Me Fierce in Danger it occurred to me that that Ellroy could be said to have pioneered two other innovations in crime fiction. The first is, for better or worse, how he has used his personal life, particularly the murder of his mother, as source material for his fiction and non-fiction. The second is the crime writer as celebrity, which was something that was certainly around before Ellroy, but he was arguably one of the first crime writers to really push this concept to fore. Would you agree with that analysis?

SP: Absolutely! At first, he only wanted to explore Jean Ellroy’s murder as an allusive influence, which can be read between the lines in his novels Clandestine and The Black Dahlia. But when the chance came along to formally investigate his mother’s murder for his memoir My Dark Places, he leapt at it. The process left him so exhausted it contributed to his nervous breakdown a few years later. During that tailspin he had several relationships with women which he fictionalised in his novel Blood’s a Rover. His personal life has influenced his writing, often at great cost. Ellroy burnished his celebrity and literary persona by giving it a name, ‘the Demon Dog’, and a recognisable look and sound. At book readings he often dresses in his signature Hawaiian shirts as he delivers his profane shtick. Ellroy doesn’t always mean to offend. His sense of humour is more self-aware than that. But he would rather offend than go unnoticed, and as a publicity strategy, it’s quite effective.

AN: In addition to exploring Ellroy’s literary influences and output, your book goes into major detail about his private life. Most fans of Ellroy’s work already know a bit about his backstory and various predilections, because, as you say, he has put it in his fiction and talked about it in interviews. But you do a real deep dive into everything from his serial womanising and his numerous brushes to the law, to his problems with drugs, his nervous breakdown, and his propensity to at times be petty, arrogant and at times rude. It is all in there. Why is it important to go into this detail and what do you think it adds to our knowledge of Ellroy as an author?

SP: I needed to compare Ellroy’s portrayal of events with secondary sources. So, in terms of Ellroy’s lawbreaking I studied the available police records. This led to a moving moment when I was interviewing author Joseph Wambaugh and I asked him to look at Ellroy’s arrest sheet. He gave me an ex-policeman’s viewpoint of Ellroy’s criminal history, describing it as ‘an addict’s cry for help’. I approached Ellroy’s difficult years with the same empathy. His transformation into a bestselling author is nothing short of remarkable. To appreciate the scale of this achievement, it is necessary to explore Ellroy’s struggles and not shy away from his mistakes.

In terms of the relationships, it was important to me that we heard the women’s voices. Especially as Ellroy had written a one-sided memoir about his personal life with the sub-heading My Pursuit of Women. Many of his ex-partners are writers and academics. I interviewed some remarkable women. They gave me profound insights into Ellroy, and yes there were examples of rude and regrettable behaviour, but many retained a deep affection for him and acknowledged that many of his relationship issues were coming from deep trauma.

AN: Can you tell us a bit about what the process of working on the book was like. How was the working relationship like with Ellroy? You hint at the answer to this at the end of your book, but can you talk a bit more about why Ellroy selected you as his biographer. I am also curious to know why he decided to divulge so much detail, good and bad, at this point in his career.

SP: There’s a line in the introduction, ‘there were times I was unsure if he had appointed me his biographer or his executioner’. Ellroy is candid by nature, and you only have to read My Dark Places or listen to him in interviews to ascertain that, but we were going so deep, on subjects previously off-limits, that I knew this was going to be an intimate life-story. Our working relationship was great fun. He has a terrific sense of humour, completely outrageous, whereas mine is droller. It was a good combination. As for why he selected me personally, there’s an adage he quotes in The Hilliker Curse ‘what you seek is seeking you’. And the level of detail he provided me stemmed from the fact that Ellroy has always been a gambler, both in his personal and artistic choices, which always end up intertwined, as it gives his work that dangerous edge.

AN: Another insight I had from reading Love Me Fierce in Danger was that Ellroy actually had three major strands to his career. There was his fiction. He wrote true crime for GQ magazine, back when that perhaps meant more than it does now. He has also had a substantial screenwriting career, which I suspect many people are not aware of.

SP: It was interesting to trace Ellroy’s journalistic career, which was in its heyday in the ‘90s as a GQ columnist and note just how exhausting it was. He travelled the length and breadth of the US covering everything from boxing to death penalty cases. It’s no coincidence that his book output began to slow down around this time. Ellroy loved GQ and regretted that their professional relationship came to an end, but he lasted longer there than many of his editors. And you’re right, I don’t think those true crime pieces would have the same impact today. The Internet has decimated print journalism.

Ellroy holds the same opinion about Hollywood. He thinks it’s over. He predicts that soon the only films that will be produced will be superhero films and low-budget indies. Both of which tend to make or scrape a profit. The sort of high-quality middle-budget crime films that Ellroy worked on will disappear. Ellroy was paid good money, and kept his expensive lifestyle afloat, working on scripts for films that were never produced. That sort of business model was never going to last. But Ellroy is sanguine over Hollywood’s decline. He profited through its best years, and is now working on different media, such as a podcast adaptation of American Tabloid.

AN: Talking about Hollywood, the most successful adaptation of Ellroy’s work is the 1997 film L.A Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson. Ellroy has a love/hate relationship with the film, veering more and more on the hate side. What is it about the film he dislikes so much?

SP: It’s odd because I know Ellroy has seen the film dozens of times, and when you watch a film that often, no matter how good it is, you’re going to spot flaws and develop an understanding of the choices the filmmakers made, which were often rushed and compromised. This is especially true in an Ellroy narrative where part of the appeal is to be swept along for the ride, and not to quibble about every plot point as you go. Ellroy claims to have hated the film since he first saw it, and that may be true, but I spoke to friends of his who swore his enthusiasm for the film when it was first released was sincere. His critique of the miscasting and several performances rings true, but I suspect his creeping dislike of the film is a desire to control his legacy on his own terms, which is ironic as Ellroy would be the first to tell you that in Hollywood the writer has no control.

AN: In terms of Ellroy’s fiction, I think it is fair to say that most crime fiction readers and critics have been united in their praise for LA quintet. American Tabloid in 1995 was very well received, and The Cold Six Thousand (2001) slightly less so. But opinion really starts to divide with the 2009 publication of Blood’s a Rover, which I liked but a lot of people were very critical of it. Opinion has further divided with Perfidia (2014) and The Storm (2019). Have you got any thoughts on what it was about Blood’s A Rover that divided people? You note in your book that Ellroy stopped doing his own research in the early 2000s, around the time of The Cold Six Thousand. Do you think that might have anything to do with why successive books, while still big sellers, have to some degree been less critically well received?

SP: Blood’s a Rover divided people because of the intensely personal angle. Ellroy worked two of his relationships with women into the text, and essentially made himself a character through Don Crutchfield. Both relationships occurred after The Cold Six Thousand was published, so it’s fair to say that his original conception of the novel was much closer to the style of American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. But in a sense, he had to make Blood’s a Rover personal as he had suffered a nervous breakdown and hadn’t written a novel in a long time. It was his comeback through a form of novel-writing therapy. The epic narratives of Tabloid, Cold Six and Rover required researchers as they had and national settings, and Ellroy could no longer simply trust his immense knowledge of the topography and culture of LA. But I must concede that reading Perfidia and This Storm is like reverse engineering a computer. You can admire how all the parts fit and work together, but they are lacking any emotional power. However, they are so crammed with historical and cultural references that they are relatively easy for critics like me to talk about. You have to hand it to Ellroy, he can confound your expectations at every turn.

AN: Your book touches on but does not go into detail about the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on perceptions of Ellroy’s work. Nearly all Ellroy’s work is very cop centric – albeit often in a critical way. There’s also the status he once enjoyed as a sort of unofficial patron of the LAPD and the way that his characters mobilise racial and other invective. The BLM has had a significant impact on crime fiction and particularly how police are depicted in crime fiction. Is Ellroy conscious that times have moved, and that his work may have to change with them?

SP: Tacitly yes. He’s become a bit more guarded in recent interviews. His status with the LAPD was always strange and full of contradictions. Many of his cop buddies were bemused by his brutal portrayal of the department in the ‘40s and ‘50s. There were plenty of good policemen back then, who rarely get a look in in Ellroy’s novels. On the other hand, many LAPD detectives would cringe when Ellroy verbally defended the officers who assaulted Rodney King. Either they were morally outraged, or they knew that the smarter thing to do would be to own the scandal and move on. Ellroy’s work will evolve gradually I expect. He doesn’t want to sound too vanilla. The LAPD is changing much faster. The age of the Ellroy-style media apologist is over. We’ll see an increasing focus on activism, diversity and community-outreach from police departments.

AN: Linked to the last question, one of the most important debates for me arising out of Ellroy’s work centres around question of verisimilitude in historical crime fiction. At one point you quote Ellroy as saying the way people spoke about issues involving race, gender and sexuality in the 1950s and 1960s was the way they spoke, and he doesn’t feel it is right to change that. I personally dislike historical crime fiction in which the characters and mores feel like they have been parachuted in from 2023, but I also understand the criticism made of authors who think that they should just be able to get away with the frequent use of racist slurs and other invective in their books because that’s how it might have been in the period they are writing about. I have also noticed how skilled authors can interrogate difficult historical issues in their work with sensitivity. How do you see this debate in the context of Ellroy’s work and legacy?

SP: I believe some historical novels are now being printed with trigger warnings. But I don’t think Ellroy would want that, as the average Ellroy sentence is not so much the trigger as the whole bloody firearm! In one sense Ellroy’s right. If you set your novel in an era when homosexual acts were illegal, then it would have been common to hear homophobic slurs in everyday conversation. He offsets this with wonderfully rich and empathetic gay characters such as Danny Upshaw, Lenny Sands, Marshall Bowen and Hideo Ashida. I don’t think Ellroy wants to ‘get away’ with using invective language, although at times he does lapse into a puerile humour that rankles. After creating such wonderful gay leading characters why does Ellroy resort to inflammatory language about historical characters (i.e., Eleanor Roosevelt) who don’t actually appear in the novels but are just referenced? Ellroy is at his best when his writing takes you to a world that no longer exists. To do this he claims to ‘live in the past’, and he often appears, even for a septuagenarian, to be a man out of time. He knows that every generation takes a portion of the English language to the grave with them, and he cleaves to his own idiosyncratic vernacular. With the exception of Mike Davis, left-wing critics tend to admire Ellroy, so I think his legacy is secure. He fears obscurity far more than controversy, so he’s concerned about making his remaining novels more ambitious and innovative than anything he’s done before. Recent societal changes will be lurking somewhere in the recesses of in mind while he’s planning his next big move.

AN: Finally, what is your favourite Ellroy work, fiction or non-fiction and why

SP: The Big Nowhere is my favourite Ellroy novel in terms of Romanticism and emotional power. The novel I admire the most is American Tabloid for its historical revisionism and epic sweep. It was the first Ellroy novel I read so it’s always going to be special for me.

Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is published by Bloomsbury.

Featured image: Ellroy, Jennifer Carroll/Knopf

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