1949. Venice, California. The "roller coaster" was dismantled for scrap metal. The movie theater on the pier is empty and boarded up. A dead body is found in a lion's cage, submerged in a canal. The first of many. Everyone tends to believe that there is no connection between the deaths. In addition to detective Elmo Crumley and a strange young man who sits all day long at a typewriter and sends out his stories to the magazines Black Mask, Supernatural Stories, Mademoiselle... Bradbury's novel, written more than twenty years after Trouble is Coming, surprised everyone. "Death is a Lonely Business" is a tribute to the hardboiled detectives of R. Chandler and D. Hammett and the classic Hollywood noir.