Death Is A Lonely Business (1985) By Ray Bradbury

A month ago Ray Bradbury died just shy of his 92nd birthday.  All I knew about him was that he was an incredibly successful writer in the “future fiction” genre.   His first big commercial success was with The Martian Chronicles, published back in 1950.  I’m not really sure why, but I don’t recall having read any of his works, though I did see the movie version of Fahrenheit 451.  

In a case of good timing, a friend sent me Bradbury’s book Death is a Lonely Business a few weeks ago.  It is set in Venice, California, circa 1949, as the menagerie that was the Venice Pier is being torn down in an early version of re-gentrification.  All of the book's characters are part of the world being left behind, be they academics, former opera divas from Chicago or silent film stars -- yes, there is a variation of Norma Desmond!

The main character is a struggling young writer living in the Venice fog.   One night the writer comes across a body that has somehow become entangled in an abandoned circus lion’s cage, submerged at high tide.  The rest of the book involves the writer’s quest to investigate this incident, and convince the local detective that it’s part of a pattern of serial killings.  An important subplot is convincing this same detective to complete his own unfinished book.

While the plot construction of Death is a Lonely Business might be a tad convoluted, it’s easy to pick out the reasons for Bradbury’s success as a writer.  I dog-eared about a dozen pages that condensed into a few sentences what could easily be stand-alone novels, my favorite tells of a dream.

"I was a writer in a small, green town in northern Illinois, and seated in a barber chair like Cal’s chair in his empty shop.  Then someone rushed in with a telegram that announced I had just made a movie sale for one hundred thousand dollars!

In the chair, yelling with happiness, waving the telegram, I saw the faces of all the men and boys, and the barber, turn to glaciers, turn to perma-frost, and when they did pretend at smiles of congratulations their teeth were icicles.  Suddenly I was the outsider.  The wind from their mouths blew cold on me.  I had changed forever.  I could not be forgiven."

From Wikipedia, I learned that the “green town in northern Illinois” alludes to Waukegan (just north of Chicago) where Bradbury was born.   Although this was not my plan, my decision to read this book was influenced by Bradbury’s death – which seems appropriate because it is a murder mystery dedicated to the memory of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, two of the masters of that genre.