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. I didn’t mind: I didn’t have anything nearly as compelling to offer.
And similarly, Steven Powell’s biography is notably short on longueurs. The grimness starts even before the murder of Ellroy’s mother when he was ten years old, with she and his father, a man for whom the word ‘deadbeat’ could have been coined, engaged in a bitter battle over him. He loved his father, although when he went to live with him after the murder he found daily existence with him a struggle.
I am putting it mildly. Ellroy’s behaviour began to revolve around speed and alcohol, to the point of psychosis, with multiple arrests (‘65 to 70’, in his words, although records suggest a far lower number) for various minor misdemeanours, the kind that come with severe substance abuse and homelessness.
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