Crumley’s novel, to which the young man donates a title (“Death Is a Lonely Business”) and numerous details, many of which parallel the unfolding case. Crumley, in fact, finishes his manuscript at about the time the young man is ready to resolve the mystery, and this ironic role change is merely one of the many such touches that Bradbury has concocted. Among the others are the fact that the cast of characters includes two aging former film stars, who continue to play different roles in real life; a cinema theater owner whose celluloid world is more real to him than the one outside his projection booth; and a former opera diva who continues to hold court and sing her arias, albeit in a rundown tenement. Still another ironic element is the fact that the most perceptive person in the novel is a blind black man, Henry, whose acute sense of smell compensates for his lack of sight. Since Bradbury’s writer-detective is beset by a head cold, he relies upon blind Henry to confirm the killer’s identity for him.

The most startling of the ironic elements emerge at the end of the book. First, the killer claims to have helped his victims: by freeing them, through death, of their loneliness. Further, he says to the writer who has just apprehended him:But you helped, too.You’re a writer. Curious. All I had to do was follow, collecting your candy wrappers as you went. Do you know how easy it is to follow people? They never look back. Never. You never did. Oh dear, you never knew. You were my good dog of death, for more times than you guess. Over a year. You showed me the people you were collecting for your books.

These people include the seductive Constance Rattigan, an aging (though seemingly ageless) actress whose star shone briefly in the 1920’s and who since has been living alone in her own sand castle, “a fiery white Arabian Moorish fortress facing the sea and daring the tides to come in and pull it down.” A mistress of disguise, she keeps her real self hidden from the public. Late at night, though, she makes clandestine visits to an old friend, a onetime opera star whose real name is Cora Smith but who is known as Fannie Florianna. Too big (she weighs 380 pounds) to sleep lying down, she spends her days and nights in a large-size captain’s chair eating mayonnaise and holding court for friends from long ago and for newer acquaintances (such as the writer) from the neighborhood. There also are the old men who gather each day at the “small, dim shop facing the railway tracks where candy, cigarettes, and magazines were sold and tickets for the big red trolley cars that rushed from L.A. to the sea.” The anonymous writer goes there for the candy bars that sustain him between checks from pulp-magazine editors.

One of the men, William Smith, has a room at an old house that is distinguished by a weathered sign in its window: “canaries for sale.” Its owner is a bedridden old woman whose empty birdcages are lined with newspapers from the 1920’s and 1930’s announcing the ascension of Hirohito to the Japanese throne and Benito Mussolini’s attack of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. Still another is A. L. Shrank, who lives on the pier in a small shack, outside of which hangs a penciled sign, “Practicing Psychologist,” and others that advertise additional, various services: reading tarot cards, palmistry, phrenology, handwriting analysis, and hypnotism. Shrank owns, by his own count, 5,910 books, which line the main room of his shack, “towering to the ceilingcliffs and towers and parapets of books,” and even fill the bathtub. Though impressed by the quantity, the writer is appalled by their titles and subjects, “their incredible dark and doomed and awful names,” volumes bereft of “summers, good weather, fair winds.”

There is Cal the barber, an inept haircutter whose dirty shop is distinguished by an old piano and a large picture that apparently shows him with Scott Joplin. There is also Mr. Shapeshade, whose Venice cinema theater is about to close down, so he offers free showings of his films from the 1920’s before taking all three hundred of them back to Constance Rattigan’s basement, where every night he and she “sit and hold hands like two crazy kids, and rob the film vaults, and cry sometimes so much we can’t see to rewind the spools.” Another specter from the past is John Wilkes Hopwood, a one-time actor whose only asset had been an Adonis-like physique and who now cruises the ocean walk on his eight-speed bicycle in search of pickups among the young men on the beach.

This gallery of grotesques is interesting and even memorable, though it does detract from the realism necessary in detective fiction. Yet Bradbury surely did not intend to produce a merely conventional whodunit. His poor and lovelorn writer-hero, who is nameless, may be Bradbury’s tribute to himself at the start of his career, and the curious intermingling of the mystery details with those concerning the act of writing novels adds still another dimension to the work, setting it apart from most whodunits and above many of them. The fundamental elements of a detective novel are present, for there is an effective buildup of suspense; clues are planted adroitly; and the resolution is effected with a skill that belies the author’s inexperience with the form. Important, too, is the fact that by the end, the amateur detective has rid his society, at least for a time, of the evil that beset it, a purgation common to the genre since the nineteenth century.

Bradbury regulars who turn to this book may be puzzled at first by the author’s striking departure from past practice, but many surely will enjoy the professionally crafted tale and be interested in the insights he gives into the creative process. Hardboiled whodunit fans may be perplexed by the strange cast of characters and also may suspect that, after all, they will find themselves in the usual Bradbury fantasy world. Here is the climactic struggle between the anonymous hero and the murderer:He shot out of the black water like a cannonball off a springboard .He was ten feet tall, a dragon yeasted up from a dwarf. Grendel, who was once a jockey.He snatched up like a Fury, talons out. He hit me like a balloon full of scalding water, with thrash and yell and shriek.We whirled around like two crocodiles at each other’s necks. From on top we must have seemed like a moil and welter of piranhas self-feasting, or a great propeller off center and amok in rainbow oils and tars.

This conclusion should remove any doubts readers have about the extent of Bradbury’s indebtedness to Chandler, Hammett, and others in the Black Mask tradition of American detective fiction.