Death is a Lonely Business - Ray Bradbury

"Venice California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad."

You may remember a certain book I spoke of in that ever-so-long ago last blog. To refresh your memory: I had attended a Ray Bradbury book signing on the suggestion of a friend of mine before I had ever read one of his books. As a result the first Bradbury novel I ever read bears his real signature on its title page, which somehow made the experience all the more interesting.

What also made it interesting was the familiarity with which I could recognize the setting. Death is a Lonely Business, as is obvious from the above quote, is set in Venice Beach, a town that Bradbury knew quite well and which he paints with a kind of barren notstalgia that brings to life an even less glamorous but still romantic past of a now ultra-funky neighborhood.

The novel itself is a detective story yet it is by no means hard-boiled. In fact the murder that initiates Bradbury's narrative is less gruesome than it is puzzling and less violent than it is mysterious. This novel is the first to introduce some of Bradbury's most eccentric but interesting characters that show up twice more to form a sort of disjointed trilogy of an unashamedly dusty vision of Los Angeles's golden-days as they have solidified in the mind of the author (the other novels are A Graveyard for Lunatics, which will be the subject of my next post, and Let's All Kill Constance, which I have yet to add to the collection).

The two most active characters in the narrative are the unlikely duo of an unnamed writer (the narrator and no doubt a pseudo-biographical avatar of the author) and the detective Elmo Crumley. My memories of Crumley lack the kind of lost-innocence, unshaven, and jaded depiction that we are used to in our noir-stories. Instead Crumley is a man of everyday ideals who must use his brain as well as the help of his writer-friend to find the reasons that a man has been found dead in the submerged circus-lion cage of a Venice canal.

Though she does not play as important a role in solving the mystery Bradbury's most fascinating character by far is Constance Rattagan. Constance is a retired movie star who lives alone in a huge house by the beach and enjoys swimming naked, drives a huge convertible, and unabashedly keeps her old films on continuous reel in her parlor so she can revel in her glory days. Constance has always represented an interesting balance to me. Anyone familiar with Bradbury knows that he constantly explores the concept of nostalgia. To most people an overbearing sense. But Bradbury paints Constance differently. She takes absolute pride in her age and owns up to the fact that her glamorous youth can never be reclaimed. But that doesn't stop her from taking pride in the actress that she once was. Quite frankly I have no recollection of how she fit into the plot of Death is a Lonely Business but her characterization left a heavy impression on me and is most of the reason I hope to seek out Let's All Kill Constance as soon as I have time to read it.
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Bradbury, Ray. Death is a Lonely Business. New York: Avon Books, 1999.