Bad guy with big dog

From Elaine Showalter's 'James Ellroy, the Ancient Mariner of LA Noir' in the Times Literary Supplement (3 Nov 2010)-

James Ellroy is the Ancient Mariner of LA Noir. For decades, he has been fixing his audiences with a glittering eye and delivering his staccato rap about his mother’s murder when he was a child, his adolescent delinquencies, obsessions and perversions, his voyeurism and addictions, and his colossal and grandiose literary ambitions. I first heard Ellroy give his spiel in a BBC radio interview in the 1990s; since then he has repeated it internationally at bookstores and literary festivals, in print and on the air; he seems to have confessed it to every interviewer but Oprah. In May 2004, he notes in this new memoir, he delivered the "six thousandth public performance of my dead-mother act'” at a gig in Sacramento, with the usual success: "I was boffo. I read from pitch-perfect memory and laid down even eye contact".

The "Hilliker curse" is the name Ellroy gives to the cosmic malediction for his guilt-ridden love–hate feelings towards his mother, Jean Hilliker Ellroy, and his belief that since her death he has been destined to pursue women who resemble her, or his fantasies of her. When his mother was killed, Ellroy began his lifelong quest "to write books and find the Other" – the woman who would be his Shelleyan partner, doppelgänger and soulmate. He must stalk these women, worship them, seduce them, protect them and save them. Moreover, he believes, his curse and his creativity cannot be separated: "The Curse incubated my narrative gift". As long as Ellroy is on his quest and toting this particular albatross, he feels that he can be a great and compelling writer. If and when the albatross drops off – when he is secure, contented, domesticated and normal – he risks losing his literary gift. Through the sheer force of his hammering prose, Ellroy aims to convince himself, and bludgeon the reader into agreement, that his art and his obsessions are the same.