Ellroy was instrumental in bridging the gap between the crime genre and literary fiction. SP: Joyce Carol Oates described Ellroy as ‘the American Dostoevsky’. That’s a story that needs to be told.ĪN: 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.
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. 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. His two memoirs, My Dark Places and The Hilliker Curse, leave decades of his life unaccounted for. But there were just as many moments in his life, if not more, that he hasn’t talked about. 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. SP: With each previous book, I’d unearth new material and nuggets about Ellroy’s life that were not previously in the public domain. What is it about him as an author and literary figure that you find so interesting and worthy of a fully-fledged literary biography?
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.ĪN: This is your fourth book on the writer James Ellroy. Powell, an Honorary Fellow in the English Department at the University of Liverpool, UK, wrote the book with Ellroy’s cooperation. 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.
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