A Graveyard for Lunatics

A Graveyard for Lunatics picks up where Death Is a Lonely Business left off, moving the unnamed writer-narrator from Venice to the backlots of a great Hollywood studio in 1954. He has been hired to write a screenplay, but on Halloween eve he discovers a papier-mache replica of a famous producer who died in a car crash two decades earlier, propped against the wall of the studio graveyard. The dead man, it appears, may not be entirely dead.

The novel is part ghost story, part Hollywood satire, part meditation on the illusions that the film industry manufactures and the real people ground up in the machinery. Bradbury spent years in Hollywood, writing for film and television, and his ambivalence about the place runs through every page: the glamour and the cruelty, the artistry and the cynicism, the way the studio system devoured its own.

Like its predecessor, the book is as much about friendship and loyalty as it is about murder. Crumley and the narrator make one of the great detective pairings in American fiction precisely because neither of them is really a detective.