Books: Dwarfed By Ancient Archetypes Death Is a Lonely Business

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...