46. Death is a Lonely Business by Raymond Chandler

This was a total stinker.  I hate to come out swinging like this, but I just went on the internet to see a bunch of people calling this noir and in the style of Hammet, Chandler, etc.  Holy fuck are people really that stupid and uncritical?!  Now to be fair, this book may stand on its own merits (though sure as hell not for me), but it is not in the style of those masters at all.  It's all endless sentences, excessive sentences and that weird 80s style poetry writing.  I guess the story is sort of noir-ish, but it's really hard to tell under the cloying layers of verbiage.   I feel bad being so critical because I have a lot of respect for Bradbury and was a big fan of his work back in high school. Maybe I should go back and read some of his earlier stuff to see if his style was always like this and I just didn't recognize it back then.  I sure hope not.

I guess this is supposed to be sort of autobiographical, about Bradbury's early days before he got The Martian Chronicles published.  The protagonist is a young man living in Venice, struggling to write and missing his love who is traveling in Mexico.  This Los Angeles, though, is one of melancholy, decay and despair (jebus, it's contagious).  He hangs around the sad old people of Hollywood past, watches as the amusement park slides off the pier into the ocean.  Slowly, various characters he meets are being killed off, though it takes forever for us to figure this out as it is page after page of him going to some place or visiting some person with tons of extra metaphors and allusions stretching them out.  I had to put the book down halfway through and almost gave up.  I picked it up a year later and just forced myself to finish it.

He's Ray Bradbury and a great writer so some of the metaphors hit but that's like saying Mr. Creosote had a delicious flavour of desert at a few points during his meal. How can you even tell?  This entire book if written by Hammet would have been maybe 80 pages. I'm glad it's over.

What's weird is everywhere it says this book was published in 1985 but mine says 1999.