Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction. Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001). The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".
Death is a Lonely Business is Ray Bradbury鈥檚 addition to the noir mystery genre.
Told with all the requisite intrigue and catchy simile and metaphor, Bradbury nevertheless cannot be mistaken as anyone but himself. Like an actor who is cast in an odd role, Bradbury remains the sentimental, kooky writer, and that is a part of this novel鈥檚 charm.
Set in an aging and decrepit Venice California in 1949, the unnamed protagonist is an overweight, clumsy, near sighted writer who bears a great resemblance to Ray. All the more fun is the frequent allusions to stories he has published that are unmistakably actual Bradbury creations. Like many of this works, Bradbury fills this with a funhouse cornucopia of colorful characters.
It is a little too slow getting started, but the ending is well worth it. Like so many of Bradbury鈥檚 works, most of the enjoyment in reading is simply his mastery of language and medium.
I've read this book twice. It is written in a noire style, but with a feel of the fantastical running through it. The main character is a struggling writer (Bradbury himself) who is trying keep his art flowing but is lonely. His girlfriend is an ocean away and he seems so detached from everyone around him. But then a murder mystery unfolds and the writer must solve it. As the novel moves forward you find that Bradbury has many friends, some existing, some new, the relationships brought about through the events in the novel. He also loves each one's uniqueness. The weirder they are the more they are loved because they are themselves. The old, the discarded, the friendless are especially dear to him. They mystery is just the method for us to learn about Bradbury's heart.
... and when October comes, it鈥檚 time to head out to Bradbury country, a place of cold fogs and whispering winds that will send a shiver down your spine and make you wonder what ghost from your past has come to haunt your dreams.
And it was in that time, in one of those lonely years when the fogs never ended and the winds never stopped their laments, that riding the old red trolley, the high-bucketing thunder, one night I met up with Death鈥檚 friend and didn鈥檛 know it.
A crime story that Bradbury dedicated to the masters who shaped his young imagination and inspired him to follow in their art and become a writer: Chandler, Hammett, Cain, MacDonald. James Crumley, a more recent author, gave for the story the name of the detective who will try to solve a series of suspect deaths around the derelict Venice pier in California, in the year 1949: Elmo Crumley.
If there was a city back there, and people, or one man and his terrible sadness, I could not see, nor hear. The train was headed for the ocean. I had this awful feeling it would plunge in.
But it is not the detective who takes us on this dark merry-go-round, but a young writer without a dime in his pocket, a sad man who misses his fiancee, gone to Mexico to study. A young author who feels the pain of the world in his bones every night as he goes around the city collecting the stories of the people who have been marooned on this empty shore: lost souls who have reached the end of their line. Another writer I tried for the first time this year, Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust , noticed that California is the place where people come to die. Ray Bradbury concurs ...
There are some people who live to be thirty-five or forty, but because no one ever notices, their lives are candle-brief, invisible small.
The prologue was one of the best set-up pieces I have read in a very long time. Ominous, poetic, disturbing. You feel like you have fallen off the edge of the world and into another place, a place where monstrous spiders lurk in the night and are waiting for you to fall into their web. ... and then the first dead body is found in the half-submerged cage of an abandoned circus.
We looked like a mob of miserable clowns abandoned on the bridge, looking down at our drowned circus.
Venice in 1949 was completely different from the sunny, young and hip place we see in recent movies. It鈥檚 days of glory are long past, all the tourists and all the money have gone elsewhere. The old arcade pier with its amusement attractions is about to be demolished, the last survivors of that age are now old and forgotten and about to be evicted. For the young writer this is the only place he can afford. For Ray Bradbury, as for his unnamed narrator, writing is a deeply personal endeavour. Feel first, write later he says to the detective Crumley when they finally meet and discover that they both have the writing bug. Empathy is the name of the game 鈥� this dreamer鈥檚 ability to put himself in the skin of the people he meets: the trio of old-timers who spend their day on a bench in the sun, the worst barber in town who still remembers meeting Scott Joplin in his youth, an ancient spinster who used to sell parrots, a former Hollywood diva from the days of the silent movies, an overweight soprano who cannot even leave her tenement apartment and who consumes huge quantities of mayonnaise, the patron of the last cinema hall on the pier, a gay body-builder, a blind man who refuses to use a cane, a clairvoyant with a large library filled only with books about depression, and so on. The writer collects their lives, trying to keep their memory alive through his typewritten pages, before they fade into nothingness. But it appears as if somebody is hunting down the very same people he meets every day, who are now dying in suspect accidents and suicides. Elmo Crumley asks for hard evidence from the young writer, but this is hard to find for these people who live alone and forgotten.
... the pier was a great Titanic on its way to meet an iceberg in the night, with people busy rearranging the deck chairs, and some singing 鈥楴earer my God to Thee鈥� as he rammed the plunger on the TNT detonator.
This is not your typical crime novel, despite the style that emulates the masters of the pulp era. The pacing is very slow, the dialogues bizarre and filled with metaphors, the clues evident to the experienced reader: all the victims share in one trait: 鈥楾here鈥檚 something broken about all those people.鈥�. It鈥檚 right there in the title, even if the identity of the dark stranger who rides the tramway on a road to hell remains unclear until the very last pages.
鈥榊ou showed me the people you were collecting for your books. All the gravel on the path, chaff in the wind, empty shells on the shore, dice with no spots, cards with no pips. No past, no present. So I gave them no future.鈥�
Even the border between reality and dream, between fiction and fact is lost in the fog. Could the young writer be the hand that cuts the story of these lonely people short? Are they all figments of his imagination? Can all this be a case of supernatural forces that were awakened by the end-of-the-world destruction of the whole Venice shoreline?
Meaningless malignity. Don鈥檛 that have a ring? It means someone running around doing lousy things, a bastard, for no reason. Or none we can figure.鈥�
This is not my first Ray Bradbury book, so I could pinpoint some of his favorite imagery here: the circus, the rollercoaster, the old cinema on a boat, the shooting gallery, the magician鈥檚 booth, the darkness that whispers secrets in your ear. I know that he tries to use the elements of the classic gumshoe novel, but my own journey was more like an elegy to the lonely people [Eleanor Rigby?] he sees on his daily walks through the city. Because this story, like many others he has written, is anchored in auto-biographical elements, memories that are haunting him since childhood, friends he has lost, places that live now only in old, faded postcards.
It was the elephants鈥� graveyard, the pier at night, all dark bones and a lid of fog over it and the sea rushing in to bury, reveal, and bury again.
Now all that remained of the old parade had ended here. Some of the cage wagons stood upright in the deep waters of the canal, others were tilted flat over on their sides and buried in the tides that revealed them some dawns or covered them some midnights. Fish swam in and out of the bars. By day small boys came and danced about on the huge lost islands of steel and wood and sometimes popped inside and shook the bars and roared.
This sense of alienation may come directly from the young boy who left an enchanted childhood in Waukegan, Illinois and moved to Venice, California to become a writer. The book was published in 1985, so this pervasive nostalgia is understandable.
When I was fifteen one of them looked at me and said, 鈥榊ou going to grow up and change the world only for the best, boy?鈥� 鈥榊es, sir!鈥� I said. 鈥業 think you鈥檒l do it,鈥� he said. 鈥榃on鈥檛 he, gents?鈥�
You cannot really separate the author from his writing, at least in the case of Ray Bradbury, for whom honesty and hard work were the most important requirements for the artist. Remember, Feel first, think later is what he tells Elmo Crumley, when the detective is complaining that inspiration fails to come when bidden. As a side note, if I were to search for anything critical to say about the book, it would be the candor and the affectation of the dialogues, not only between the writer and the detective, but in all of the narrator鈥檚 interactions with the people on his death list. They are like actors reciting the lines of a script, and excellent script but an artificial, contrived one, nevertheless.
鈥榊ou鈥檙e not one of them, I can tell. You couldn鈥檛 rape a chorus line, or use your agent鈥檚 desk for a bed. You couldn鈥檛 knock your grandma downstairs to cadge the insurance. Maybe you鈥檙e a sap, I don鈥檛 know, or a fool, but I鈥檝e come to prefer saps and fools, guys who don鈥檛 raise tarantulas or yank wings off hummingbirds. Silly writers who dream about going to Mars and never coming back to our stupid daytime world.鈥�
Yet, when it clicks, the style is heartbreaking and powerful, some of the best passages I have read from Bradbury, filled with the bitter truths and the hopes he clings to in his effort to put to sleep the demons who haunt his nights.
The voice from the past, making you remember a familiar thought, a warm breath in the ear, a seizure of passion like a strike of lightning. Which of us is not vulnerable, I thought, when it comes to that three-in-the-morning voice. Or when you wake after midnight to find someone crying, and it鈥檚 you, and tears on the chin and you didn鈥檛 even know that during the night you had had a bad dream.
This is a story about an elephant鈥檚 graveyard in the last days of the Venice amusement pier. This is a story about a voice in the night, calling you with a promise of a shared memory, a respite from loneliness and despair, a dark presence waiting in the fog. It could happen to you, too.
It applied to anyone who had ever loved and lost, meaning every single soul in the whole damn city, state and universe. Who, reading it, would not be tempted to lift a phone, dial, wait, and whisper at last, late at night: Here I am am. Please 鈥� come find me.
A young writer rides the trolleybus late one night in Venice, California, only to have a sinister whisper in his ear that 'Death is a lonely business.' By the time he plucks up the courage to turn round, the person has got off the trolley car. But this is only the prelude to a series of displacements and possible murders as various people that the writer knows are targeted, starting with his discovery when walking home of an old man's body dumped in the canal. Soon he is fully engaged in trying to track down and stop the killer with the help of a cast of eccentric characters including washed-up film stars, a cop who is a secret novelist, a blind man, and a retired opera singer. Even the minor characters are memorable, such as the barber who can't cut hair but lives on the past glory of once having had a piano lesson from Scott Joplin.
Another main character is the setting which brilliantly evokes the rundown former glamour of an area now starting to be demolished. Being Bradbury, the writing is colourful, vivid, slightly sentimental but not overdone. I realised after finishing the book that the protagonist is probably based on his youthful self.
The only thing that held this book back from a full five stars is that the ending is not quite satisfying enough. There were a few candidates for the (what would now be termed serial) killer and I thought it would have been a great twist if it had turned out to be a less obvious one. But other than that I can't fault the book and so it has a well-deserved 4 stars.
I love Ray Bradbury. I love his books, I love his short stories, I love how his cover picture has been the same one (the one of him holding his cat) for as long as I can remember, and I love that people always ask if he's still alive or not. The man is a mystery to me, and some of his books and stories touch me in ways that other books and stories have not. (No, that's not meant to be dirty. For once.)
and are the two Most-Important-Bradbury-Books-to-Me. I read them at the right age, they made an impression, they will always be near and dear to me. Most of his short stories are fantastic as well, but since you're not asking, the story that has stayed with me the most over the years is , the title of which I can never remember and I usually have to ask my brother. (This time I did an Interwebz search and found it. Yay me!)
What those books and that story have in common are their sense of the fantastic. That's what I love about Bradbury - they're coming-of-age stories and Bradbury writes children better than most adult writers can, and then he throws in some crazy unimaginable stuff and the whole story goes supernova.
Death Is a Lonely Business isn't quite like that. This is different than his usual writing - this is his attempt at a noir, his homage to or . Bradbury uses himself in the story as a younger man. It all seems like something I would probably dig a lot. Unfortunately it didn't quite work for me.
I don't blame Bradbury for this; my head is totally elsewhere. But maybe this isn't the genre for Bradbury. The fact that I don't believe (but could be wrong) he did any other books like this indicates maybe he felt the same way. Still, considering I will read anything Bradbury put on paper, this wasn't a complete disappointment. I think I'll just be sticking with his more fantastical stories in the future.
A dark mystery/detective story (kind of) in typical Bradbury style. Marvelous writing and good, memorable characters.
What I learned: Not to read this book while home alone on a stormy night with family away in the LA area of California. At least I wasn't listening to Tosca.
I decided that I'm in the mood for a hard-boiled detective story. And I haven't read a Bradbury novel in a long, long time. Supposedly, the main character is based on some of Bradbury's own experiences while he was rising through the ranks of pulp fiction writers in the 1940's.
Update: I'm about 60 pages from the end, and I must admit, I'm having trouble getting through this book. Bradbury has populated his book with characters who are interesting, if not borderline preposterous. The same goes for the dialog. A little too colorful to be believable.
I was hoping that this would have more the character of hard-boiled fiction (a la Hammett or Chandler). The great thing about those writers and their ilk is that they could write in a terse, matter-of-fact, muscular style. Their characters had feelings, sure, but they avoided expressing them. So when the expression came out, it was all the more poignant.
Bradbury violates the rules of hard-boiled fiction by reveling, if not blubbering, in emotional expression. I'm not saying that this book is lacking in interest, but I am saying that maybe Bradbury tried too hard to make it work on too many different levels.
What he ends up with is rich, but slow-moving. Nothing much happens, but we sure meet a lot of different characters who effusively express themselves about a whole lot of nothing.
Overall, a disappointing read. It has none of the magic that I found in The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, etc.
While not Bradbury's all time best, this is a nice change of pace. Written relatively recently-- 1999-- the book is a postmodern mystery with a young version of the writer himself cast in the role of the detective. The killer is particularly creepy, an unseen presence waiting outside the homes of lonely failures, waiting for a chance to end their lives without ever doing more than gently touching them. Old women scared to death, drunks turned over in bathtubs, blind men tripped on staircases... and an old man drowned in a lion's cage.
The climax didn't quite satisfy, but it's a good read. There are a lot of references to Bradbury's science fiction stories. You can see the ostensible roots of "The Veldt" here, of fragments from Something Wicked this Way Comes, and "The Foghorn," which looms larger than life throughout the story. As a Bradbury fan, those moments of recognition added a fun element to the book.
For more on comics, humanity, morality and the world check out The Stupid Philosopher, aka a place where I put my words.
Bradbury鈥檔in polisiye roman谋 oldu臒unu bilmiyordum. Biraz 艧a艧谋rarak ba艧lad谋m. Romanda iki 眉莽 sayfa okundu臒unda yazar谋 tahmin edebilirsiniz. 脰yle derin bir karakteristi臒i var. Bradbury tam olarak kendini yans谋tan bir noir yazm谋艧. Amat枚r bir yazar谋n d谋艧ar谋dayken bir gece kula臒谋na 鈥溍杔眉m yapayaln谋z bir i艧tir.鈥� diye f谋s谋ldan谋yor. Sonras谋nda da cesedi fark ediyor. Yer yer do臒a眉st眉 bir konuya ba臒lanacakm谋艧 hissi veriyor t眉m bunlar. Roman谋n polisiye k谋sm谋n谋n iyi oldu臒unu s枚yleyemem. Bradbury hemen her kitab谋nda kulland谋臒谋 莽ocukluk an谋lar谋/travmalar谋na bu kitab谋nda da yer veriyor. Farkl谋 bir noir yorumu okumak isteyenin ho艧lanaca臒谋n谋 d眉艧眉n眉yorum.
Surtout connu pour ses livres de SF Bradbury signe en 1985 ce superbe roman noir. 脗g茅 de 65 ans l'auteur rend hommage aux grands mystery writers comme Raymond Chandler et au Los Angeles de la fin des ann茅es 40. Largement autobiographique le livre t茅moigne d'une 茅poque r茅volue : celle des machines 脿 茅crire, des montagnes russes sur Venice Beach et du cin茅ma muet. On y croise les fant么mes de sa memoire, galerie de personnages excentriques, chanteuse d'op茅ra ob猫se 茅ternellement alit茅e, poin莽onneur octog茅naire ou vieille actrice sur le d茅clin. Le tout sur fond de r茅flexion de ce qu'est l'acte d'茅crire.
A great mystery from the master wordsmith. A noir thriller that plays out like a classic black and white movie while being a bit surreal at times and uniquely clever. A very Goodread.
The author's youthful surrogate searches for the killer of a menagerie of despairing losers in 1950's Venice. Existentialist neo-noir of the highest order. I've never been a huge Bradbury fan and was shocked at how good this was. It's less a mystery novel than a reworking of genre tropes used to explore the rapidly fading grandeur of 50's Los Angeles and the occasional tragedy of human existence. Its slapstick surrealism reminded me somewhat of Inherent Vice, but its earthy, honest sentimentality, the lived in feel of the scenery and setting, renders it a clear notch above Pynchon's work. In fact there are a lot of over-hyped literary types who've attempted to mine similar territory, more pretentiously and to less effect. In short, Paul Auster would give his left nut to write something half as good. You should really give it a gander.
The unnamed narrator of is a writer living in Venice, California, where the local carnival pier is being demolished. He discovers the body of an old man, underwater and trapped in a lion cage.
It turns out he had previously met the old man at the trolley station. As he seeks to learn the old man's name, he meets another elderly neighborhood resident, who tells him someone has been lurking in the hallway outside her room. She suggests that Death himself is waiting for her. Over the next few weeks, he gets to know other colorful locals and hears more stories of odd odors, shadowy presences, and silent callers.
The writer lives on the beach among interesting people, including Constance Rattigan, a movie star who hasn鈥檛 been seen publicly since the 1920s. The book is set in 1949 although Bradbury wrote it in 1985. Other characters include the canary lady, a group of elderly men, and a housebound soprano.
The writer reluctantly teams with local police detective, Elmo Crumley, to try and solve the case. The only clues they have are the writer鈥檚 intuition, articles that go missing from the deceased鈥檚 residences, and a blind man鈥檚 keen sense of smell.
The characters are written in typical Bradbury style, full of depth and are well developed. Once going the story runs along nicely, but for me it was a slow start.
If you enjoy reading "Death Is a Lonely Business", you will be happy to learn that Bradbury enjoyed writing it and went on to use some of the same characters in two more books of a trilogy. "A Graveyard for Lunatics" was published in 1990 and "Let鈥檚 All Kill Constance" in 2003. Ray Bradbury died in 2012.
Ray Bradbury鈥檔in 鈥溍杔眉m Yapayaln谋z Bir 陌艧tir鈥� kitab谋 (鈥淒eath is a Lonely Business鈥�), gizem ve noir unsurlar谋n谋 i莽eriyor. 1949 y谋l谋nda Kaliforniya鈥檔谋n Venice b枚lgesinde ge莽iyor ve gen莽 bir yazar谋n kar艧谋la艧t谋臒谋 esrarengiz cinayetleri 莽枚zme 莽abas谋n谋 konu al谋yor. Yazar, cinayetlerin pe艧ine d眉艧erken kayg谋, 枚l眉m korkusu ve yaln谋zl谋k temalar谋 眉zerinden de i莽sel bir yolculuk ya艧arken yazarimiz karma艧谋k bir dil ve 眉slup kullaniyor.
Ben insanda da kitapta da netlik severim 馃榿. Bu kitaba ba艧larken bir polisiye okuyacak olmanin heyecani i莽indeydim . Daha ilk on sayfada ben ne okuyorum 艧u an diye kafam kar谋艧t谋, devam ettik莽e aydinlanmam gerekirken kitaba daha da yabanc谋la艧t谋m.
Klasik bir dedektif hikayesi gibi g枚r眉nse de, esasen yaln谋zl谋k, ya艧lanma ve 枚l眉m gibi felsefi temalara yo臒unla艧mis ve ben bu derin ve sembolik anlat谋m tarz谋ndan ho艧lanmad谋臒谋m i莽in 1,5鈥檛an 2 yildiz veriyorum kitaba.