Ray
Bradbury’s non-fantasy novel Death is a
Lonely Business was published in 1985.
It
might not be fantasy, but it’s pure Bradbury in its style, descriptions, characterisations,
humour and pathos and nostalgia. The noir detective story is dedicated to the
memory of Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Ross MacDonald, among others.
It’s
a first-person narrative by an unnamed struggling fantasy and science-fiction writer in
Venice, California, in July, 1949, which seems plagued by fog at this time of
year.
‘During
the night, the fog thickened and way out in the bay somewhere sunk and lost, a
foghorn blew and blew again. It sounded like a great sea beast long dead and
heading for its own grave away from shore, mourning along the way, with no one
to care or follow’ (p19). This passage alludes to one of Bradbury’s famous
short stories, ‘The Fog Horn’. He returns to the fog horn beast later: ‘You are
left stranded on a cold dune with an empty typewriter, an abandoned bank
account, and a half-warm bed. You expect the submersible beast to rise some
night while you sleep. To get rid of him you get up at three AM and write a
story about him, but don’t send it out to any magazines for years because you
are afraid. Not Death, but Rejection in Venice, is what Thomas Mann should have
written about’ (p50).
The
story begins late at night when he is travelling on public transport and a
passenger breathes on his neck from behind and whispers ‘Death is a lonely
business’. He is so scared he doesn’t risk looking at the owner of the voice.
And then the man is gone. On his way home, our narrator discovers a dead body
in the canal. At the scene he meets detective Elmo Crumley; their paths are
going to cross often, in two more books, in fact. Crumley ‘tilted his head now
this way to look at me, and then tiled it the other way, like a monkey in the
zoo staring out through the bars and wondering what the hell that beast is here
outside’ (p54). Crumley’s heart is in the right place and takes a shine to our
narrator, happy to compare notes. He says, ‘You know, I wish I could bring all
the rot I see every week here and use it for mulch. Boy, what roses I’d grow!’
(p84). At one point Crumley uses the phrase ‘Long after midnight’ during a
hypnotising session (p192) – which just happens to be the title of a Bradbury
collection of stories. Bradbury named his detective after the crime author
James Crumley, in tribute.
Later,
the narrator is haunted by that phrase – and decides it will make a good title
for a book. To make matters worse, he has caught a cold and his sense of smell
has deserted him.
He
is drawn to do a little bit of investigating and enters the rooming house of
the deceased. Upstairs is the ‘canaries for sale’ lady, seemingly confined to
her bed – a modern Miss Havisham, who possessed a ‘tiny yellowed head’: ‘She
lay flat and strewn out so delicately I could not believe it was a living
creature, but only a fossil undisturbed by eternity’s tread’ (p27).
There
is a creeping suspenseful menace about the narrative. More than one person
described the sensation of a person waiting outside their bedroom door. ‘… but
what if one night whoever it was came into
the room? And brought his lonely
business with him?’ (p33).
We
meet a number of fascinating and even eccentric characters, including Cora
Smith, who called herself Fannie Florianna. Grossly overweight, she is now a
retired opera singer of some renown. Then there was the old lady ‘who spun the pink cotton candy machine and
sold illusion that melted in your mouth and left you hungry long before Chinese
food’ (p73). And Mr Shapeshade and Mr
A.L. Shrank, a strange ‘shrink’. And Cal, the atrocious demon barber: ‘…cut
hair so you looked as if you’d been
blown dry by a Kansas twister and combed by a maniac wheat harvester run amok’
(p109). And Constance Rattigan, the movie idol in her sixties: ‘I guess I have
too many producers’ fingerprints on my skin’ (p138). And the matinee idol John
Wilkes Hopwood who ‘threw his head back with that merciless grin that flashed
sabres and promised steel. He laughed silently, in honour of the old days,
before films talked’ (p160).
Bradbury
makes many observations that catch the mood or the period: ‘Silence. And the
sound that waiting makes on the telephone line’ (p62). Maybe that’s why we
started getting plagued with canned music while we waited; silence was too
terrible? Here’s another: ‘The car windshield was like a great eye, weeping and
drying itself, weeping again, as the wipers shuttled and stopped, shuttled and
stopped and squeaked to shuttle again’ (p113).
The
narrator has a box beside his typewriter, where he keeps his ideas; ideas that
spoke to him, telling him where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do.
‘So my stories got written. Sometimes it was a dog that needed to dig a
graveyard. Sometimes it was a time machine that had to go backwards. Sometimes
it was a man with green wings who had to fly at night lest he be seen…’ (p118).
And he sells a tale to Bizarre Tales
about a man ‘who feared the wind that had followed him around the world from
the Himalayas and now shook his house late at night, hungry for his soul’
(p120).
There
are a number of deaths before the end, most of them poignant and tragic.
As
hinted, there is a measure of autobiography here as Bradbury lived in the area
described until 1950; and this is where he wrote his early stories which began
to establish his fame.
The cover is appropriate.
Two
sequels follow: A Graveyard for Lunatics
and Let’s All Kill Constance.
This
is my review of A Graveyard for Lunatics,
which clearly I read out of sequence:
WRITEALOT:
Book review - A Graveyard for Lunatics (nik-writealot.blogspot.com)
