PLOT DEVELOPMENT. Death Is a Lonely Business (1985):

Lecture 5

Death Is a Lonely Business (1985):

Plot Development, Character Development, Setting, Themes.

Alternative Perspective: A Postmodernist Reading

Death Is a Lonely Business (DLB) was Bradbury’s first novel published since Something Wicked This Way Comes, a gap of twenty-three years. Bradbury’s move to mystery fiction, while not a new genre for him since he had published a number of mystery and suspense stories in pulp magazines during the 1940s, brought a variety of responses from reviewers. Some praised the novel, while others criticized it. In a 1985 review, critic Paul Barber notes that “readers will see that [Bradbury] is still engaged in his lifelong quest for a literary form that will stand still for the demands that he puts on it…. His interest is…in finding, somehow, a means of breaking through the limitations of space and time and form, a way of saying the ineffable…. where the characters can’t go, the images will.” Barber realizes that Bradbury “uses the conventions of the detective novel to create something that is profoundly, fundamentally different from the detective novel,” and praises the poetic images, vital characters, and vivid description (Barber 1).

Brian Sibley, writing in the Los Angeles Times, praises the horror elements of the novel: “the more terrifying because it is centered upon minutely observed life…. there will be [readers], horror-hungry, who will relish this nerve-freezing confection” (Sibley 36). As Sibley notes, some readers do not appreciate Bradbury’s work: a review printed in Kirkus Reviews characterizes the narrator and plot as “soft-boiled,” and condemns the “superficial use of [the] murder mystery format.” Unlike Barber and Sibley, this reviewer characterizes the novel as a “YA [Young Adult]-ish fantasy,” as “cute and gushy,” and as having “quirky blending of creepiness and humor, innocence and decadence, nightmare and cartoon” (“Review” Kirkus Reviews 799).

The disagreement among critics seems to echo the debate about Bradbury’s science fiction, focusing on how he uses the conventions of a popular genre, whose market depends to a great extent on writers following the conventions, while simultaneously bringing in conventions from other genres, all the while adding his own blend of poetry and a writer’s observations on American life. This novel is one of three semiautobiographical works that draw on Bradbury’s life during the late 1940s and early 1950s instead of on his childhood. The other two novels in this group are A Graveyard for Lunatics and Green Shadows, White Whale.

PLOT DEVELOPMENT

While most of the DLB ’s events can be summarized in a fairly straightforward manner, Bradbury’s creation of a writer-narrator who is “telling” the story and the other characters in the novel result in a complexly layered plot structure. In effect, two plot lines combine to create the overall structure of the novel. The first plot is the mystery plot; the second is about a writer who writes mysteries (and horror and fantasies). This second plot could be described as the “Great American Novelist” plot.

The mystery plot opens one dark night on a trolley, when the narrator has an encounter with what he believes is a drunk who speaks mysteriously about death. When the narrator returns home, he discovers a body stuffed in a lion cage that was dumped in the canal near his home. As the police investigate, the narrator takes some wet paper found in the victim’s pockets. He starts to investigate and becomes convinced he met the murderer. While he has some difficulty at first persuading Elmo Crumley, the police lieutenant in charge of the case, to accept his help, his identification of the paper as trolley transfers convinces Crumley to include him in the investigation. The narrator and Crumley soon become targets of a frightening kind of harassment: a stormy presence outside their doors late at night that leaves water or seaweed along with wet footprints and a lingering sense of fear and despair.

Other people die, and the narrator and Crumley investigate, with the help of Constance and Henry. While the narrator does not know all the victims, he knows most of them fairly well. His knowledge of the people leads him to find the clues to identify A. L. Shrank as the murderer. On another dark night, he confronts Shrank and elicits a confession. The nature of the murders comes out: Shrank never killed anyone through physical violence, only through manipulation and a version of emotional blackmail and intimidation. He frightened them to death, or into disappearing. He tried to intimidate the narrator and Crumley the same way, but they were able to resist the despair because of their success in writing. Shrank claims that his efforts led to peace for the victims, who were suffering. The confrontation between the narrator and Shrank ends when the narrator tells him that there is one last “Lonely,” or empty one, to kill: himself. On hearing that, Shrank jumps into the water, then leaps out and drags the narrator in with him. They fight underwater, and the narrator pushes him into the same lion cage in which the first victim was found. There Shrank finally dies.

Interwoven with the mystery plot is the writing plot. This plot is what twists the conventions of the mystery genre and what makes the novel so recognizably a part of Bradbury’s “fantastic” writing. This plot starts with the writer suffering from writer’s block. He had been selling stories for pulp magazines for thirty or forty dollars a story. But he hasn’t written anything since trying to start the “Great American Novel” on July 1, 1949, the same day that Peg (his fiancée and probably his muse) left to study in Mexico. Events motivate him to start to write again; he writes about the people he meets and talks to during the investigation. During the course of the novel, the narrator receives a letter from the American Mercury offering to publish one of his stories for $300, an entirely different level of publishing. This event is similar to Bradbury’s shift from publishing in the pulp magazines to publishing in the “slicks” for more money.

Elmo Crumley, the police detective, turns out to be a writer who has also been blocked on his novel. The narrator encourages him to write, even giving him a title for his novel: the words the narrator heard from the man on the trolley he believes is the murderer. The narrator had planned to use it for his own novel, but he gives the title to Crumley as a gift and says he can find another for his own book. The narrator makes Crumley promise to get up and start writing before anything else. And it works; Crumley starts writing regularly, and then finishes his book in a marathon session. His finishing the manuscript scares off the murderer, who had been leaving water and seaweed outside his door at night. Crumley and the narrator realize that their happiness and success has scared away the murderer.

The two plots of the novel come together in the character of the narrator, but they also come together in the question of how one lives life: by thinking rationally about facts or by feeling and intuiting. The narrator believes too much thinking is bad—for writing, for living, and apparently for solving murders. He makes no attempt at the usual kind of investigation found in mysteries; he doesn’t collect alibis or look at any clues except the ones involving paper—the trolley ticket punchouts, torn up notes, tabloids. Crumley is the advocate of facts and rationality; he keeps demanding material proof from the narrator that the deaths are anything but accidents. The debate over how to conduct an investigation turns into the question of how to write.

By the end of the novel, the narrator has “won” both debates; he is correct that the deaths are not accidental, and he discovers the murderer. Both the narrator and Elmo Crumley break out of their cases of writer’s block and succeed in their projects. The novel the narrator is writing during the course of the novel turns out, in a circular structure, to be the novel that we are reading. Crumley eventually publishes his novel as well (described in A Graveyard for Lunatics).

The writer’s plot also connects to an element of the novel that Bradbury is known for in his other work. This element is the attention paid to describing the lives of people. In a traditional mystery plot, events arise out of earlier events, that is, they are caused by those earlier events. Characters, to a certain extent, serve the plot’s needs. In the writer’s plot, the focus is on characters rather than specific events. The interactions of the various characters in Venice and Los Angeles, some of whom the narrator already knows and some of whom he meets during the course of investigating the murder, are what interest the writer. These characters form their own kinds of communities within the larger urban setting: the inhabitants and owners of attractions on the pier (Shapeshade, Annie Oakley, and Shrank), the inhabitants of the Los Angeles tenement (Fannie Florianna, Sam, Jimmy, Pietro, and Henry) and the film community (Constance and Hopwood). These communities show the diversity of cultures in Los Angeles during the 1940s.

Both plots depend on the presence of books in the narrative. Books are clues for the writer-narrator as well as being his business. When the narrator first sees Shrank’s library on the pier, he assigns a certain meaning to it, and then must revise his understanding of what the library means. At first sight, the narrator is impressed by the sight of so many books and the fact that Shrank can tell him exactly how many books he owns. However, what the narrator fails to notice—the exact nature of those books—turns out to be one of the major clues: “That dreadful escarpment inhabited by dooms, that lineup of failures, that literary Apocalypse of wars, squalors, diseases, pestilences, depressions, that downfall of nightmares, that pit of deliriums and mazes…. this was no library, it was an abattoir, a dungeon, a tower” (260).

In this book about murder, literature is one of the most important elements. Literature is explicitly referred to in the novel in two ways: the literary allusions made by the characters and the books associated with Shrank. The narrator and Crumley (between the two of them) allude to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Hemingway, and Pope. Hopwood tries to bribe the narrator with the chance of meeting Aldous Huxley, and the narrator’s response shows how much he is tempted, almost to madness, because of his admiration for Huxley’s work and wit. The narrator describes Shrank’s library as containing books with depressing themes: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Suicide as an Answer, The Red Sun Rises, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and books written by Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Sigmund Freud, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Marquis de Sade, Eugene O’Neill, and others.

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