Ella Leffland, a California author whose critically acclaimed novels probed the layered history of her home state as well as the mental topography of outsiders and villains, including the Nazi leader Hermann Goering, died on Sept. 18 in San Leandro, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was 92.
Her death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her cousin Carolyn D’Elia. Ms. Leffland had no immediate survivors. Her niece, Karn Hassler, and nephews David See and Erik Leffland had been caring for her for the last several years.
Ms. Leffland grew up in Martinez, Calif., a city on the Carquinez Strait northeast of San Francisco. Her parents were Danish immigrants who referred to their native country as “home,” so growing up, she felt “either a double sense of belonging or no sense of belonging,” Ms. Leffland said in a 1992 interview.
“I think coming from a family that was different and had a different attitude toward things had a bearing on the people I write about,” she added.
Memories of her California youth during World War II became fodder for one of her best known novels, “Rumors of Peace” (1979), a coming-of-age tale about a young tomboy, as Ms. Leffland described her, growing up in Mendoza, Calif., a fictionalized version of Martinez.
“I had a very strong reaction to the war,” Ms. Leffland said in a 1990 interview with Publishers Weekly. “It was the central experience of my childhood. I had an absolute terror of being bombed — not by the Germans, God knows, but by the Japanese.”
The Nazis, too, were ever-present in her personal “sphere of terror,” she said, given the daily news reports of Hitler’s rampage through Europe. Her evocation of a sun-dappled life in California during the war years is “like stepping into a Norman Rockwell painting,” Daphne Merkin wrote in a review in The New York Times.
Unlike Rockwell, however, Ms. Leffland “shades the nostalgia of her evocation with dusky, anxious touches — a brother gone off to war, the unwitting cruelty of adolescence — that emphasize the imperiled nature of even this most snug of worlds.”
Ms. Leffland tackled the topic of war directly in “The Knight, Death and the Devil,” her 1990 “historical biographical novel,” as she called it, that explored Goering’s rise — or rather, descent — from a World War I fighter ace to a Nazi leader who commanded the German Luftwaffe in World War II to his suicide by cyanide capsule before he was to be hanged for his war crimes conviction during the Nuremberg trials.
Ms. Leffland researched her subject with the zeal of a historian, including traveling to Germany to interview key Third Reich figures like Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect and close confidante, who served 20 years in prison as a war criminal.
“Miss Leffland’s imagination and language soar,” the critic Herbert Mitgang wrote in a review for The Times. “For the moment, the reader can almost forget that the subject of her story cooperated in the worst Nazi crimes, set fire to Britain’s cities and bombed civilians during the Blitz in World War II.”
Through fiction, she could explore elements of Goering’s psyche that biography could not. “I went by my feeling that the novel, with its layered interworkings of meaning, was the only form appropriate to the complexities and incongruities of Goring’s character,” she was quoted as saying in the Times review.
Ella Julia Leffland was born on Nov. 25, 1931, the youngest of three children of Sven Leffland, who was in charge of a paint crew at a Buick dealership, and Emma Jensen.
Ella submitted her first story to a magazine at age 14 while she was a student at Alhambra High School. After graduating from San Jose State University in 1953 with a degree in fine arts, Ms. Leffland settled in San Francisco, where she became active in the bohemian subculture centered in the North Beach neighborhood. At 28, she sold her first short story, “Eino,” about the impact of World War II on a German boy, to The New Yorker for $750.
In 1970, Ms. Leffland published her first novel, “Mrs. Munck.” The book’s protagonist, Rose Munck, is an embittered widow in her 40s living in the fictional town of Port Carquinez who plots revenge on her partially paralyzed uncle-in-law, who long ago seduced her, resulting in a child who died in a violent altercation between them.
In a review in The Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the book “a powerful dramatization of an oppressed woman’s plight and revenges — a novel straight out of the tradition of the Brontës and Thomas Hardy.”
“Mrs. Munck” was transformed into a dark comedy for Showtime in 1995 starring Diane Ladd, who also directed the film and adapted the screenplay with Ms. Leffland.
Her 1974 novel “Love Out of Season” chronicled a tangled love affair between a San Francisco artist and a school psychologist. “Breath and Shadows” (1999) was a survey of three generations of a wealthy Danish clan that Brooks Hansen, in a review in The Times, called an “exquisite and moving family saga.”
Ms. Leffland continued publishing short stories in magazines like The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine along with various literary journals. In 1977, she was a winner of the O. Henry Award for her short story “Last Courtesies.”
Despite her accolades, Ms. Leffland never took her deft ability to write prose for granted. “I started writing at about 10,” she once said, “and all I can say is that it’s gotten harder ever since.”
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