A Memory of Murder (Dell, New York, 1984) is an atypical collection of fifteen short stories by the late and much- lamented Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). They were written at a time (1944 to 1948) when he was still trying to find his literary ‘voice’ – though ‘The Small Assassin’ has since become one of the world’s most reprinted short stories, in any genre. ‘Wake for the Living’ was later re-titled ‘The Coffin’ for its first harcover appearance in Dark Carnival (Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1947: Hamish Hamilton, London, 1948), along with ‘The Small Assassin’.
When Bradbury made a name for himself with such books as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, Popular Publications retained their copyright on the thirteen stories that Dell planned to publish in A Memory of Murder. Bradbury added ‘The Small Assassin’ and ‘Wake for the Living’, contributed an Introduction (‘Hammett? Chandler? Not to Worry!’) – stipulating that the book should only be issued once, as a mass-market paperback. From the Introduction (edited highlights):
"When my first detective mystery stories began to appear in Dime Detective, Dime Mystery Magazine, Detective Tales, and Black Mask in the early ’40s, there was no immediate trepidation over in the Hammett-Chandler-Cain camp. The fact is, it didn’t develop later either. I was never a threat. I couldn’t, in the immortal words of Marlon Brando, have been a contender.
"I was a survivor, however, and one of my heroes was Leigh Brackett {1915-1978}, who met me every Sunday noon at Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, California, there to read my drear imitations of her {Eric John} Stark on Mars stories or my carbon copies of her first-rate detective tales, which were beginning to appear in all the above mentioned magazines. I would lie on my back and weep with envy at how easily her characters slid forth, adventured, died, or lived to grieve a death. How she managed to plow through my agonized contrivances I cannot say. The word friendship arises here to oil the machinery.
"Starting back in the year I left Los Angeles High School, I put myself on a regimen of writing one story a week for the rest of my life. I knew that without quantity there could never be any quality. I sensed that my stories at that time were so bad that only practice could clean the junk out of my head and let the good stuff flow. In the meantime, I tried to cram as much literary experience as I could – good, bad, indifferent, or excellent – into my eyeballs so that eventually it would jump out of my fingertips.
"I hasten to add that all this was not mechanical . . . I loved what I was doing, even as a mother loves her homely or ugly babies. You may not like my children, but at the time I wrote them, I was plowing my typewriter and reaping the paragraphs. God protects young writers so they do not know, at the time, how badly off centre they are performing. That’s what quantity production is all about. The good stories you write later are an umbrella over the bad stuff you discover you left behind you in the years. It all equals out. And, if you love writing, it is all a lark.
"It follows that detective fiction, as well as the fantasy, science, and weird genres, was a lark of mine. My talent developed faster in the latter fields because it was intuitive . . . The detective tales, because they required hard thinking, prevented my flow, damaged my ability to use my intuition to the full. They were, as a result, quite often walking wounded. {Today} I feel I might be able to do better. I feel it enough, I might add, that I recently finished – and Knopf will soon publish – my first mystery suspense novel, Death is a Lonely Business {in 1985: Grafton, London, 1986}.
"Now, as to the stories in this collection. First, the titles. I would like to have changed some of them from their pulp versions, simply because I did not like the titles the editors of those magazines hung on my stories without asking permission. After all, ‘Hell’s Half Hour’ and ‘Corpse Carnival’ are not exactly sterling examples of title-making. I was astonished when the editors let ‘The Trunk Lady’ and ‘The Long Night’, my titles, slip through.
"Perhaps this collection is only of historical interest to those with an immense curiosity about my work in a field unfamiliar to many, but I can name my favourites. ‘The Long Night’ and ‘The Trunk Lady’, and add that ‘The Small Assassin’ seems to be one of the best stories in any field that I have ever written. It was so successful, in fact, that it appears to have influenced a dozen novels and films written and produced in the last ten years.
"As for the other stories, you must read and judge. But I hope that you will judge kindly, and let me off easy. I was, after all, in my early twenties and still had a long way to go, with Hammett and Chandler and Cain way over there on the horizon, standing tall, and me on the beach, sweating it out and taking advice from Leigh Brackett. I hope that her dear ghost will not mind that this book and its stories are dedicated to her with love."
CONTENTS:
‘The Small Assassin’ (Dime Mystery Magazine, November 1946: reprinted in Suspense, Spring 1951) is one of Bradbury’s most well-honed and deservedly acclaimed stories. The title plays fair with the reader. It was adapted by the author himself for an episode of The Ray Bradbury Theatre TV series (first broadcast 9th April, 1988), starring Cyril Cusack, Leigh Lawson, Lottie Ward, and Susan Wooldridge. Bradbury might have thinking of I Don’t Want to Be Born, a horrible 1975 British horror movie starring Joan Collins, which was released in the USA as The Devil Within Her.
‘A Careful Man Dies’ (New Detective Magazine, November 1946). "For a hemophiliac, no object is innocent, and even a kiss can kill!" (blurb). It was filmed in 2005 by co-directors Simone Siragusano and Riccardo Cendamo (available on http://vimeo.com).
‘It Burns Me Up!’ (Dime Mystery Magazine, November 1944). "I am lying here in the very centre of the room and I am not mad, I am not angry, I am not perturbed" (whistling-in-the-dark first line). See also Ray Bradbury Comics 3, published in 1993.
‘Half-Pint Homicide’ (Detective Tales, November 1944). This story features Douser Mulligan, an idealistic ex-policeman who might have turned out to America’s answer to the Saint, but didn’t. There is a memorable climax on the merry-go-round at Venice beach – Something Wicked This Way Comes, in embryo.
‘Four-Way Funeral’ (Detective Tales, December 1944). The return of Douser Mulligan. Description: "The gentleman stood there, not much taller than Douser, who was very short."
‘The Long Night’ (New Detective Magazine, July 1944). "Outside the apartment house all the guys came together Gomez, Tony, the Baron, the Sandman de Califa, and the others" (opening sentence). The Shape of Bradbury Stories to Come. It is another dull October night in a nameless city not unlike Los Angeles, soon to be disrupted with a murder by fire. The ethnic ambience presages both ‘The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit’ (1958) and ‘The Life Work of Juan Diaz’ (1963).
‘Corpse Carnival’ (Dime Mystery Magazine, February 1945, as by D. R. Banat.). "The surgeon’s scalpel finally brought separation to Raoul and his twin. But one of them was now a corpse, and for the strange survivor, the future was a nightmare from which there could be no waking!" (blurb). This carnival-based short story rivals anything written by Fredric Brown or even William Lindsay Gresham (of Nightmare Alley fame). Bradbury’s preferred title was ‘The Very Bewildered Corpse’, but it could just as easily have been Something Wicked This Way Comes. Also in Strange Detective Mysteries, Canada, August 1945.
‘Hell’s Half Hour’ (Dime Mystery Magazine, March 1945, as by D. R. Banat). Chris Prior, lieutenant of homicide for the small Californian town of Green Bay, investigates the brutal murder of a blind man named Caldwell. He is accompanied by a non-official sidekick, Douglas, who might or might not be an idealized version of Bradbury himself (Douglas was his middle name). This is dry run, of sorts, for Death is a Lonely Business (see below).
‘The Long Way Home’ (Dime Mystery Magazine, November 1945). Charley Guidney finally gets the better of his cheating wife, Lydia, and the ending has an O. Henry-type twist in the tail (literally, perhaps!).
‘Wake for the Living’ (Dime Mystery Magazine, September 1947). ‘The Premature Burial’ – Bradbury style. Eat your heart out, Edgar Allan Poe!
‘"I’m Not So Dumb!"’ (Detective Tales, February 1945). "Oh, I’m not so dumb. When those men at Spaulding’s Corner said there was a dead man hereabouts, you think I ran quick to the sheriff’s office to give in the news?" (opening sentence). Spaulding was the maiden name of Bradbury’s paternal grandmother. He would later make ‘Doug Spaulding’ the main character in Dandelion Wine (1957).
‘The Trunk Lady’ (Detective Tales, September 1944). "In a family where everyone had secrets, little Johnny {Menlo} had found the deadliest one of all – and now he would have to die for it!" (blurb). The surname ‘Menlo’ might be a reference to Thomas Edison, who was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park (near San Francisco).
‘Yesterday I Lived!’ (Flynn’s Detective Fiction, August 1944). "Her beauty on the silver screen obsessed him. Over and over she died for him, while, silent and hating, he waited for her to spell out the name of her murderer!" (blurb). ‘Her’ is Diana Coyle (movie star) – ‘him’ is Cleve Morris (studio cop).
‘Dead Men Rise Up Never’ (Dime Mystery Magazine, July 1945). "We thank with brief thanksgiving/Whatever gods there be/That no life lives forever;/That dead men rise up never;/That even the weariest river/Winds somewhere safe to sea" (Swinburne). Bradbury was always inspired by poetry, and this story combines 19th century romanticism with the hard-boiled ‘realism’ of – say – James Hadley Chase.
‘The Candy Skull’ (Dime Mystery Magazine, January 1948). "In the morning light, shadows of the children ran and ran across the pink and blue tiles of the plaza, while on the bronze beach Old Tomás sat, very withered, very indignant, waving his scarred hands at them. One small Mexican boy held a cape and wooden sword; another enacted the part of the enraged bull" (first paragraph). There is another character called Douglas – McClure, this time. No relation, I suppose, to the actor Doug McClure (1935-1995).
Forty years after writing his last pulp-magazine mystery story, Bradbury returned to the genre with a full-length novel, Death is a Lonely Business (publication details above). Set in the atmospheric Venice, California, of the late 1940s, it deals with a murder investigation led by the eccentric Detective Lieutenant Elmo Crumley. He is joined by an unnamed young pulp-fiction writer whom we might call – let us say – Douglas. Constance Rattigan, a troubled movie star, also gets in on the act.
A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (Knopf, New York, and Grafton, London, 1990) re-united this oddest of all odd couples. The time is now the early 1950s, and ‘Douglas’ has been hired as a writer of sci-fi B movies for Maximus Films. "An anonymous invitation leads him to a graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall – and to the discovery of body frozen in time and poised to climb from the city of the dead to the city of light" (blurb).
Let’s All Kill Constance (William Morrow hardcover, January 2003: Avon paperback, January 2004) takes place in 1960, with the same cast of much-changed characters. Constance Rattigan, whom time and Hollywood has turned into a facsimile of Norma Desmond, is the eponymous human target. "Not everyone can get away with starting his tale with: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ Bradbury acknowledges his impudence by asking whether that’s any way to grab the attention of readers. It is" (Bergen Record).
The ‘Nameless Writer’ trilogy – for the want of a better term – deserves to be better-known and more widely read. But I hold a special affection for the early pulp stories bound together in A Memory of Murder. Ditto this back-cover blurb: "REVEALED – FOR THE FIRST TIME! THE SKELETONS IN RAY BRADBURY’S CLOSET!" The cover painting (by Anon) evokes the best vintage work of Rudolph Belarski, Earle Bergey, and H. Lawrence Hoffman.
