Death Is a Lonely Business
Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Key characters: Narrator (Bradbury simply known as The Writer, or The Crazy), Detective Elmo Crumley, Henry the blind man, silent screen star Constance Rattigan, Fannie the opera singer, Cal the barber, and an assortment of oddballs who live and work on the Venice pier.

Summary: Venice, California in the early 1950s is a dying town. The amusement pier is being torn down bit by bit. The rollercoaster, the shooting gallery, the movie theater--all are doomed. And now someone is preying on Venice's lonely people. Some have died, some have vanished, but no one suspects foul play until a young writer of weird tales begins to put the clues together.

Review: Death Is a Lonely Business is Ray Bradbury's first mystery novel. (Followed by A Graveyard for Lunatics and Let's All Kill Constance.) As a mystery, it's not especially satisfying. A good mystery is a story that can be enjoyed twice. First you read it to solve the mystery yourself, following the clues and trying to guess "who done it" before the culprit is revealed. On second reading you know who the villain is, so you are able to focus on the finer points of the writing itself, catching the subtle clues and subtext that you may have missed the first time. Death Is a Lonely Business is no better the second time through.

The connection between the incidents in this novel is rather thin. And they are incidents, not really murders. The killer takes a hands-off approach to his victims, merely helping them along in their own self-destruction. Some victims aren't killed at all, they simply run away. Perhaps they've gone off in search of a better novel to live in. Not surprising when you consider that some of these victims never appear in this one. Three of the victims, all living in the same tenement, are done away with before we get a chance to meet them. "Trust me," Bradbury seems to say, as he quickly summarizes each man in flashback, "They were real characters and they really got done for!" Only one of the novel's victims is a detailed character whose death seems truly tragic, but this only makes the other incidents seem trivial. (These vague victims are actual characters in the early Bradbury story "The Long Night" and in the oddball character study "Massinello Pietro.")

The real victim of the novel is the Venice pier. Bradbury the narrator may cry over the loss of his fictional friends, but Bradbury the author is obviously moved by the loss of the very real amusement pier. The first body is found in an old lion cage sunk in the canal, but this is the only place where murder and the decaying carnival world are directly linked. If Bradbury had associated each incident with a part of the pier and killed off some of his more colorful characters instead of using vague stand-ins, perhaps the reader would better feel a sense of loss for this bygone era.

Bradbury has always written sentimental, semi-autobiographical tales of his younger days, but he is better at connecting plot, character, and metaphor when he is writing short stories. Several of these stories are alluded to within the novel. Below is a list of the stories I was able to identify from their descriptions.

• After the Ball
• Calling Mexico
• The Emissary
• The Fog Horn
• The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair
• The Next in Line
• No News, or What Killed the Dog?
• Skeleton
• The Thing at the Top of the Stairs
• The Trolley
• Uncle Einar
• The Wind
• Why Didn't Someone Tell Me About Crying in the Shower? (poem)
• The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit
• Ylla