Death is a Lonely Business

This was a treat of a reread. The narrator is a down at heel writer, soaking up the atmosphere around his 'apartment' and using it for material. On a train one night, a drunk sitting behind him says 'Death is a Lonely Business'. He doesn't look at the man, but the phrase sticks with him when he leaves the train. Shortly after he finds a body floating in an old cage by the pier which is being demolished, the start of a series of happenings he tries to unravel with Detective Crumley.

As ever with Bradbury, wonderful writing.

Ray Bradbury isn’t known for his detective fiction and so when I discovered he wrote some I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to read one. This is the first in a series which tells me he must have had fun writing them. It shows. Because of the way Bradbury writes and his ethereal world-building, the story is more than just a who-dunnit.

Like the Leavenworth Case, this book features an official detective (Elmo Crumley), but it isn’t he who ferrets out the truth but a struggling writer (you can’t help but feel his inner-workings are autobiographical). One night on the train, our young writer tries desperately to ignore a drunken man who is mumbling and whispering, but he does hear the dark mantra “Death is a Lonely Business” show more though he tries hard not to. On his walk to his apartment he finds a corpse locked inside a derelict circus cage, drowning in the bottom of one of Los Angeles’s famous canals. Only he believes it to be murder and this knowledge possesses him in a frightening way -

“...my fingers began to type, x-ing out the UNTITLED NOVEL until it was gone.
Then I went down a space and saw these words begin to jolt out on the paper.
DEATH and then IS A and then LONELY and then, at last, BUSINESS.
I grimaced wildly at the title, gasped, and didn’t stop typing for an hour, until I got the storm-lightning train rolled away in the rain and let the lion cage fill with black sea water which poured forth and set the dead man free…
Down and through my arms, along my hands, and out my cold fingertips onto the page.
In a flood, the darkness came.
I laughed, glad for its arrival.”

Desperately the writer tries to convince Crumley there is a crime and a victim to be championed, but there is barely any evidence and the writer must go it alone. We meet a motley cast of characters along the way; John Wilkes Hopwood, The Canary Lady, Mr. Shapeshade (could that BE any more Bradbury???) and Constance -

“Hers had been a swift year in the Twenties, with a quick drop down the mine shaft into the film vaults. Her director, old newsprint said, had found her in bed with the studio hairdresser, and cut Constance Rattigan’s leg muscles with a knife so she would no longer be able to walk the way he loved. The he had fled to swim straight west toward china. Constance Rattigan was never seen again. If she could walk, no one knew.”

Isn’t that brilliant? Deep, swirling mystery. A legend within a ghost story. Basically all the characters are like that and their individual oddity saves them from outright pathos. Here’s Henry -

“And it was Henry with No Last Name, Henry the Blind who heard the wind and knew the cracks in the sidewalk and snuffed the dust of the night tenement, who gave the first warnings of things waiting on the stairs or too much midnight leaning heavy on the roof…”

Oh how I love the way Bradbury writes. In many ways Stephen King reminds me of him, but not so surprising in his disconnected perfection. Anyway, eventually our writer does convince Crumley, but not without a high price. Death duties crush him with more bursts of creativity and he’s torn between the need to keep his friends alive and his need to write. If you like your mystery with a heavy presence of the arcane you will love this book. If you love interesting wordplay and juxtapositions of description, you will love this book. If you thought Bradbury only wrote about Mars and nostalgia, you’ll be surprised. show less

I didn't plan it this way, but for me the turning of the year was bookended by two Ray Bradbury titles. I started Death Is a Lonely Business (1985) near the end of December because it was available on my Kindle and I was stuck lying down, nursing a sore back. It ended up being my final book of 2017.

I hadn't read a Bradbury novel in decades and had him pretty much lodged in my mind as a writer of pulp sci-fi short stories--a more than competent one, to be sure, but for me not the stuff of a steady diet.

So I was taken by surprise by the depth and complexity of the novel, from its predominant theme of death and its agents to the delicate, wavering balance between illusion and consensual reality accomplished by locating the imaginative show more flights in the mind of the first-person narrator, whose name we never learn. Thematic elements, lush evocation of time and place, and quirky characters that stop short of grotesquerie by virtue of their humanity round out the quasi-detective story with its backdrop of Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Bradbury was 65 when he wrote it, and that's not too young to be pondering the transitory nature of things.

From LibraryThing I learned that this book is the first of three so-called Crumley Mysteries. Detective Lieutenant Crumley does have a role to play, but he is present more as a catalyst than as a major actor. It is not first of all a detective story but rather an almost mystical meditation on death and life and how people's lives intertwine.

And so when I ran out of pages in Death Is a Lonely Business, I downloaded the second, A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (1990), which became my first completed work of 2018.

Discovering this dimension of Bradbury after so long is a refreshing surprise and a bright spot at the start of a perilous year. show less

A young writer rides the trolleybus late one night in Venice, California, only to have a sinister whisper in his ear that 'Death is a lonely business.' By the time he plucks up the courage to turn round, the person has got off the trolley car. But this is only the prelude to a series of displacements and possible murders as various people that the writer knows are targeted, starting with his discovery when walking home of an old man's body dumped in the canal. Soon he is fully engaged in trying to track down and stop the killer with the help of a cast of eccentric characters including washed-up film stars, a cop who is a secret novelist, a blind man, and a retired opera singer. Even the minor characters are memorable, such as the barber show more who can't cut hair but lives on the past glory of once having had a piano lesson from Scott Joplin.

Another main character is the setting which brilliantly evokes the rundown former glamour of an area now starting to be demolished. Being Bradbury, the writing is colourful, vivid, slightly sentimental but not overdone. I realised after finishing the book that the protagonist is probably based on his youthful self.

The only thing that held this book back from a full five stars is that the ending is not quite satisfying enough. There were a few candidates for the (what would now be termed serial) killer and I thought it would have been a great twist if it had turned out to be a less obvious one. But other than that I can't fault the book and so it has a well-deserved 4 stars. show less

In Death is a Lonely Business, Ray Bradbury makes a delightful foray into the realm of the mystery story.

It was a dark and stormy night -- MY words, not his, he's much more creative than that! But in that classic atmosphere of mystery, in a lonely streetcar screeching around a curve, whistle screaming, a sinister stranger whispers "Death . . . Death is a lonely business." When our protagonist stumbles upon a body -- in a most unusual resting place -- on his way home from the streetcar, we're off on the adventure.

This strange, gentle mystery (populated with the kind of oddball characters that only Bradbury could conjure) is set in the peculiar environs of 1949 Venice, California, amidst abandoned canals and circus wagons, the constant show more thrum of oil rigs, and the tearing down of the old amusement pier -- and with it, the death of a way of life. Death seems to be all around, and it is, indeed, a lonely business.

Throughout this marvelous little book, the reader can savor the luminous language, the amazing use of metaphor, which is Bradbury's hallmark.

Highly recommended. show less

Death Is a Lonely Business is a good old-fashioned mystery, Bradbury style. When I first read it upon discovering Bradbury as a teenager, I liked it but it wasn't one of my favorites...now, fifteen years later, I would rank it among his best.

In it, the protagonist (who bears a striking resemblance to a young Ray Bradbury), with the help of no-nonsense police detective (and frustrated novelist) Elmo Crumley, tries to discover who's behind a series of mysterious deaths and disappearances. It becomes personal when several of the victims are his friends or have some connection with him (such as his barber, who once dreamed of being a pianist and regales his clients with the story of how he once met Scott Joplin).

The solution is vintage show more Bradbury, as he explores the connection between art and life, and how embracing life means going out and living it...loving, dreaming, creating. The villain, by contrast, doesn't strive to make his values real, but the opposite: "I hate everything. Name it, there's nothing in the world I like." Projecting his own desire for death onto others whose "crime was giving up or never having tried", whom he calls "The Lonelies", he "helps" them to achieve the oblivion he himself so desperately craves.

The cast of characters---victims, suspects, and those helping solve the case---is very well-drawn, particularly the fading movie star Constance Rattigan and the blind neighbor Henry. And Bradbury's at the top of his form here, with lots of evocative imagery, metaphors, and stylistic flourishes, but not overdoing it. This is just an all around great read! show less

Venice, Californie. Nous sommes en octobre 1949, par une nuit d'orage, dans un gros tramway rouge, vieux, grinçant. Le narrateur y est seul avec un homme ivre qui se met à geindre, lui soufflant son haleine avinée dans le cou : ' Oh ! la solitude est un cercueil de verre. ' Puis l'inconnu disparaît. En contrebas, dans le canal, un vieillard se balance, mort, dans une ancienne cage à lion. L'inspecteur Crumley mettra bien du temps à se laisser convaincre par le narrateur, jeune romancier un peu ' tête brûlée ', qui prétend avoir entendu l'assassin et qui a commencé son enquête auprès de personnages on ne peut plus singuliers. Dès lors, qui, de Crumley ou du détective amateur, débrouillera l'énigme ?