Death is a Lonely Business

1949. Venice, California. The "Roller Coaster" has been dismantled for scrap. The theater on the pier is empty and boarded up. In the lion's cage, submerged in the canal, a dead body is found. The first of many... Everyone is... inclined to believe there is no connection between the deaths. Except for Detective Elmo Crumley and a strange young man, spending whole days at a typewriter, sending out his stories to magazines like "Black Mask," "Supernatural Stories," and "Mademoiselle." Bradbury's novel, written over twenty years after "Something Wicked This Way Comes," surprised everyone. "Death is a Lonely Business" is a tribute to the "tough" detectives of R. Chandler and D. Hammett and classic Hollywood noir.