Books: Death is a Lonely Business By Ray Bradbury (1985)

I’m back after nearly a month of being sick and not wanting to do anything but watch TV and cough like an old engine trying to pretend they’ve not thrown a piston.

“Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer (who bears a resemblance to the author) spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort--until strange things begin happening around him. Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious "accidents"--some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.”

Like authors who would come after him, authors who were influenced by him, Ray Bradbury’s Death is a Lonely Business –his contribution to the noir genre- is a tale of remembrance of an earlier life, when things were horrible yet hopeful. Set in and around 1949 Venice California, our unnamed hero is an overweight, clumsy, near sighted writer who bears a great resemblance to the writer himself (there are frequent allusions to stories he has published).  

The book is filled colorful characters –some, at times, bordering on the preposterous- but the enjoyment of Bradbury comes from the surreal, like the city of Venice sitting between two worlds, one of reality where the city of Los Angeles Parks and Recreation obvious distaste for Venice's honky-tonk atmosphere and wanted the area dismantled, and one where the old Pier and surrounding canals held dark, fantastical secrets. You also get a sense that Bradbury found the weirdness of the people more interesting -they are loved by him because they are themselves. So the old, the discarded, the friendless seem more enduring to him (again something like writers Peter Straub and Stephen King picked up on).

It is a little too slow getting started, but it remains classic Bradbury, even if it was written much later in his life. It’s still a great tale from a master wordsmith.