How hardboiled detective fiction saved James Ellroy

Public readings by James Ellroy would tend to begin like this:

Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty sniffers, punks and pimps. I’m James Ellroy, demon dog of American literature, the foul owl with the death growl, the white night of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. My books are written in blood, seminal fluid and napalm.

Etcetera. This is his ‘demon dog’ persona, adopted many years before as a way of overcoming his native insecurities.

At school, Ellroy adopted a persona whose main shtick was expressing a fondness for far-right politics

He is quoted in this biography as saying that this persona is ‘about 3 per cent’ of who he is. I would say, and I choose the adjective carefully, this is a conservative estimate. A few years ago I was at a party in Los Angeles and got talking to one of his ex-lovers. It was like listening to the Ancient Mariner: a long narrative of gruelling outlandishness which had made her seemingly unable or unwilling to talk about anything else.