The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The ‘demon dog’ of fiction bares his teeth
James Ellroy’s lunatic persona has always looked like an act. But the man behind it might be just as wild
352pp, Bloomsbury, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £11.24 ÌÌÌÌÌ
When I saw James Ellroy in conversation at a literary festival a few years ago, the self-styled “demon dog” of American fiction largely ignored the interviewer and kept striding to the front of the stage to bellow at the audience. During the course of one of his alliterative, rhythmic riffs, he promised that if we all bought his latest novel he would guarantee that in heaven we could have sex with the 10 people we most desired while alive. In an age of identikit literary events, this one stood out – I am unlikely to confuse it in memory’s eye with, say, An Evening with PD James – but those of us hoping for a glimpse of the real man behind the prepackaged shtick went home frustrated.
One comes away from this new biography of Ellroy, however, with the sense that his public persona – rebarbative, showy, manic – is far from inauthentic. If there is a mildmannered Wizard of Oz inside Ellroy’s booming façade, he is buried unreachably deep.
Old friends attest that in his teens Ellroy was already speaking in the performative style we are now all familiar with from both his public appearances and his books: “He was a pre-rapper. He would talk in rhyme and poetry constantly,” recalls one former girlfriend. And a long line of ex-squeezes quoted here (many of whom have found their names given to dead hookers in Ellroy’s novels after the relationship has ended) suggest that the borderline-lunatic persona is not exactly an act.
One reports that whenever Ellroy suffered from insomnia, he would act out Ernest Hemingway’s shotgun suicide. And a married woman he was pursuing claims that he ordered his friends to repeatedly ring her up and tell her to leave her husband; when that failed, he tried sitting outside her window at night, howling. The pastor at his second wedding disliked him so much that she told the bride the marriage would not last.
Steven Powell, a British academic, has spoken to dozens of whiplashed witnesses to the Ellroy story, as well as securing many hours’ worth of interviews with the demon dog himself. Powell convinced Ellroy he was the man to take on his biography after unearthing the hitherto unknown identity of the first husband of Ellroy’s mother, Jean – a possible suspect in Jean’s still-unsolved murder, which took place in 1958 when her son was 10.
It is perhaps because he has never discovered the truth about his mother’s death that Ellroy has embraced the paranoia which gives a charge to his best books: in The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential and American Tabloid, catastrophes are never random, but the result of the intricate machinations of a corrupt political class and the crooked cops who prop it up.
A rare conservative in the pantheon of America’s leading novelists, Ellroy once owned a bull terrier named after his heroine,
Margaret Thatcher. But in one sense, she would not have been his type: he is said to date only women whose political views are diametrically opposed to his own. This, Powell reckons, is part of a revolt against tranquillity, which he sees as inimical to Ellroy’s work: “The more friction and unresolvable conflict that existed in his personal life, the more visceral his art became.”
Certainly, there is a demonic edge to Ellroy’s best work that makes most other crime novels, even the darkest, seem like comfort reading. He reportedly lives a more harmonious life nowadays, reunited with his second ex-wife, Helen, but living a few doors away from her, so as to avoid the constrictions of cohabitation. But contentment may explain why, as Powell tactfully puts it, his most recent novels are “beginning to lose a sense of emotional power”.
One can imagine that, in the future, somebody will draw on the material Powell has accumulated to produce a crazier, more poetic, more Ellroy-esque portrait, but this book is a highly enjoyable read in its own right, 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?