Death Is a Lonely Business

The events take place in Venice, California, in 1949. The main character is a budding, but so far not very successful writer. One late evening, sitting on a streetcar in the rain—rain that only adds to the oppressive mood—someone unknown shouted from behind: “Death is a lonely affair!”

A little later, the hero finds a man’s corpse in a canal and understands that the stranger on the streetcar and this corpse are somehow connected. He turns to detective Elmo Crumley, who arrived at the scene, and tries to prove that the death in the canal wasn’t an accident. The investigator himself keeps an unfinished manuscript at home in a drawer, so at first he treats the idea skeptically—but when corpses begin appearing one after another, he takes up the investigation.