Death Is a Lonely Business

Death Is a Lonely Business is Bradbury's love letter to a place and a time: Venice, California in 1949, a seaside community of canals and carnival relics, of elderly residents living out their last days in cheap rooms above the water. When they begin to die in suspicious circumstances, a young science fiction writer, clearly Bradbury himself, finds himself drawn into an investigation alongside a grizzled detective named Elmo Crumley.

The book is a detective novel in the way that Bradbury's science fiction is science fiction: the genre is a vehicle, not a destination. What he is really writing is an elegy for a vanishing world, for the old men and women who had washed up in Venice and were quietly disappearing, and for his own younger self, broke and uncertain, writing in a rented room and trying to believe it would come to something.

It is also the funniest of his novels, full of self-deprecating wit about the writer's life. Bradbury once said that every writer carries a personal Sherlock Holmes inside them, someone who notices everything. This book is his.