Dwarfed By Ancient Archetypes Death Is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury; Knopf; 278 pages; $15.95

By Stefan Kanfer

The Los Angeles teenager always knew that he was different. Even his suit was not like any classmate's. There was a bullet hole in it. The boy had inherited the jacket and pants from a late uncle, murdered in a robbery four years before. "That's probably what turned me on to the hard-boiled-detective genre," recalls Ray Bradbury, 65. "It's just taken me a little longer than I expected to get around to it. But I have an excuse. After all, there was work to do."

That work consisted of more than 400 short stories, film scripts of his novel Fahrenheit 451 for Francois Truffaut and of Moby Dick for John Huston, TV adaptations of Bradbury tales, plus poems, articles and plays. By his early 20s, the son of an impoverished electrical lineman had begun to write his way out of the Depression. The familiar Bradbury style was set early: an amalgam of myth, sentiment and evocations of Poe and H.G. Wells. At 26 he was already being asked where he got all his ideas. With that kind of reader interest, he felt secure enough to marry a bookseller named Marguerite McClure. They settled in the creaky beach community of Venice, Calif. Recalls Bradbury: "If a time machine were to return us to that now fashionable scene it would be unrecognizable. An amusement park was going to seed. Lion cages were sunk in the water. The roller coaster was decaying, ready to fall into the sea. All around us was a freak show of old movie personalities and show-business hangers-on. It was like something out of a novel."

Now it is something in a novel. Bradbury calls it Death Is a Lone- ly Business, and he dedicates the work to such masters of the form as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are about as close to this beachfront vaudeville as Mars and Saturn are to Pluto (the Disney dog, not the planet). It hardly matters. All of the productions, from Something Wicked This Way Comes to The Martian Chronicles, are portions sawed from a long plank called Bradbury. Brief or full length, they bear the characteristic fine grain, knots, splinters and warps.

Here the protagonist is an anonymous young writer hacking out Bradburyesque stories for the pulps. The time is 1949, the place is Venice, and in the distance the pier is "falling apart and dying in the sea and you could find there the bones of a vast dinosaur, the roller coaster, being covered by the shifting tides."

Whenever a young Bradbury hero appears, a sideshow of grotesques cannot be far away. It is peopled by a "canary lady" who never leaves her empty birdcages, an enormously fat opera singer, a blind black man with at least seven senses, and Mr. Shapeshade, the owner of an obsolete cinema with one word on the marquee: GOODBYE. They and other harmless old creatures are the apparent prey of Mr. Lonely Death, "a happy child in the fields of the Antichrist." With the aid of a local detective who would rather be writing novels, the narrator winnows a weird field of suspects and runs the killer to earth, or in this case sand. Thereupon "all the souls of all the people lost and not wanting to be lost . . . wailed out of me."

Death suffers from an overload of sunstruck prose: "Her round face was a moon watching over the vast territorial imperatives of her body." Even so, Bradbury remains a conjurer, and whenever his plot or prose flags, he brings on a new character: the worst barber in the world; "a circus of one" who moves his feast of dogs, cats, geese and parakeets from a roof in the summer to a basement in the winter, never speaking to people, only singing to them; a gape-mouthed alcoholic who sleeps in empty tenement bathtubs. These people are exaggerations, of course, but they remain recognizable members of that unending troupe of ragpickers and pensioners now huddled under the generic label Homeless. Bradbury's sympathies are with them, and his hero is soon dwarfed by the ancient archetypes who save the story by running away with it.

They work so well because their creator never looks at them with the eyes of a sociologist or a folk singer. He remains, despite whitening hair and expanding waistline, despite a popularity that has sold 40 million books in 20 countries, that eager high school senior with the chipmunk grin who still contemplates the world as if he were seeing it for the first time. "My four daughters are grown up," he says, "and I'm a grandfather three times. But I'm still one of those oversize kids who say Gee whiz! I say it at least twice a day."

As if to underline that adolescent sense of wonder, Bradbury refuses to fly ("pure fear") or even to drive ("bicycle's good enough"). Every morning, the oversize kid takes leave of Marguerite and their home in the pleasant Cheviot Hills section of Los Angeles and heads for an office in Beverly Hills. There, amid a clutter of toys, masks, board games and books, he works on at least six projects at a time, continually surprising himself. His current favorite: a space opera about a man once blinded by a comet who murderously seeks it in the void. "Sort of Ahab with jet boosters," as the author sees it. He also plans a new book of verse, a novel, a collection of articles past, and a nonfiction work on Ireland, a place he has not lived in since 1953. "I had a dream the other night," he remembers. "A voice with a brogue whispered, 'Would you moind puttin' somethin' down about me?' It was Nick, my cab driver from Dublin. I had been storing him for 30 years. How can you ever run out of ideas with a subconscious like that?"