DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS - book review

 

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)