CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. The unnamed first-person narrator and protagonist of Death Is a Lonely Business is also the main character of this novel

The unnamed first-person narrator and protagonist of Death Is a Lonely Business is also the main character of this novel, which is set about half a dozen years later. The narrator is in his early thirties and is now married to Peg, who became his fiancée in DLB, although during the novel she is away at a conference in Connecticut. He is an atypical character for the hard-boiled mystery genre or even traditional detective fiction: sweet, slightly dumpy, a film fanatic, and a would-be film writer. Unlike traditional male heroes (or even the popular image of the male writer crafted by Ernest Hemingway), the narrator doesn’t drink, sleep around, or get into fights. Instead, he chews gum, wears glasses, and falls in love with, marries, and is faithful to his wife, despite the temptation offered by Constance.

This narrator is a grown-up version of the kind of character who was tormented by adolescent peers. In this book, however, he’s the writer as well as the protagonist, and is thus able to make himself the hero of the story. Kessel questions the hero’s self-portrayal as an “invulnerable” innocent: “This is the novel of a boy dazzled by the movies, whose contact with the harsh realities of their production has left him fundamentally unaffected” (Kessel 8). No matter what seductions or temptations come his way, this protagonist remains true to his values.

The narrator, who used to wait outside the film studio gates as a teenager to collect autographs, has recently made it inside the fence to join his boyhood heroes. He has been hired to write the screenplay for a monster film that his high school friend, Roy Holdstrom, is making the monster for. Roy Holdstrom is a character based on Bradbury’s friend, special-effects specialist Ray Harryhausen. Roy makes special-effects models of dinosaurs, monsters, and landscapes. The original plan is for the two to create the studio’s next major monster movie. On Halloween, mysterious events start taking place at the studio, and the narrator investigates, with the help of his friends from the previous novel: Elmo Crumley, Constance Rattigan, and Henry.

The host of minor but important characters at the film studio include Manny Leiber, the head of the studio; Doc Phillips, a studio doctor; Stanislau Groc, Lenin’s make-up man; Fritz Wong, a director; and Maggie Botkin, a film cutter and editor. These characters are part of the studio system. Although the focus of the novel is the making of a film, actors are not particularly represented: only one, J.C. (who believes he is Jesus Christ), the lead actor in one of the studio’s films, makes an appearance.

The characters are clearly divided between the business people or managers who run the studio and the creative people who make the films. The two groups of characters are often hostile toward each other because of their different interests. The creative people’s disdain for the money people comes through clearly in Maggie’s long speech to the narrator, in which she reveals that she has not followed the orders of the studio heads but has saved the original versions of films she’s been ordered to cut for financial reasons. The business people and the producers are dedicated to running the studio as a business, and they have more power than the creative people. The creative people, however, have what the narrator sees as the near-magical power of creativity, but they suffer under the control of the owners.

Several characters are part of the mystery plot and are revealed only near the end of the novel: James Charles Arbuthnot (the Beast) and Emily Sloan. Arbuthnot is believed to have been dead for twenty years but is resurrected during the course of the novel. At the start the narrator seems to see his body at the graveyard at the top of a ladder. What is revealed by the Beast, a terrifying yet fascinatingly deformed man, is that he is Arbuthnot, mutilated from the car accident that supposedly caused his death. Emily Sloane, the other survivor of the accident, has been in a comatose condition in a sanitarium for twenty years.

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