Hi, all. I'm posting a review I wrote for this book of Bradbury's; I thought it might prove a good read for anyone interested in seeking out this particular collection....


A Memory of Murder
By Ray Bradbury

Reviewed by J. Patrick Jensen


"Perhaps this collection is only of historical interest to those with an immense curiosity about my work in a field unfamiliar to many...�

� From Bradbury's Introduction of this out-of-print 1984 Dell paperback

I purchased A Memory of Murder a year after it was published, enticed not only by its lurid, retro-pulp cover depicting a terrified dame in the stranglehold of a hooded skeleton set against a carnival backdrop, but also by the prospect of owning a unique volume showing how Ray tackled detective fiction as a struggling twentysomething scribe.

"What you have here in this collection, then, is a record of the way I wrote and tried to survive in the early '40s, with Leigh Brackett trying to help around the edges. I floundered, I thrashed, sometimes I lost, sometimes I won. But I was trying."

Ray does lose with a few of the contained stories; often his detective tone comes off a bit derivative and forced. But none of the tales are so bad as to be unreadable � most are quite entertaining, actually � and occasionally there is a kind of prognostic flash of Bradburian imagery where we see his developing voice surfacing over the hardboiled approach.

Interesting to note are the two stories, �Half-Pint Homicide� and �Four-Way Funeral,� which feature a character named Douser, or �the Douser.� This ferret-like little man �bugs� criminals to their consternation and ultimate ruin. His methods are trickery and agitation, falling in step with high-profile lawbreakers and playing up their insecurities until they break. It�s obvious Bradbury intended the Douser to become a recurring character, but the little guy never made it beyond these two stories. Perhaps the reason is that Bradbury gave up the detective tale to pursue genres that came more naturally, namely his weird tales and sf/fantasy sociological stories, or grew tired of Douser, who was supposed to come across as clever but winds up a bit annoying to the reader as well as his victims. I�d say he dropped this particular pursuit due to both.

In mystery, horror, fantasy and science fiction, the �twist ending� has always been prevalent, where the surprise conclusion is pulled out from under the carpet for all to see. A potential problem with this sort of trickery is that the reader might feel more manipulated than enlightened after that carpet has been pulled from beneath his/her feet when the author performs his trick. A Memory of Murder�s contributions to this genre are �The Long Way Home� and �I�m Not So Dumb!� � both whodunits, the former placed in an urban setting, the latter in a rural one � and �Hell�s Half Hour,� a kind of �locked room mystery� about a blind man found murdered in his ravaged tenant room during (according to the old landlady) a befuddling twenty-minute scuffle. These stories are moderately entertaining, but their chief existence relies on a gimmickry that tends to render the tales somewhat empty reads.

The seasoned Bradbury reader will find pleasure in recognizing those prognostic flashes of images and themes later explored in definitive works. In �Half-Pint Homicide,� for instance, the crime lord winds up on a spinning carrousel and is found the next morning, regressed to a state of insanity. �So he reverted to full childhood, pulled a baby�s tantrum.� The reader automatically summons up the image of the spinning carrousel of Cooger & Dark�s Pandemonium Shadow Show and cannot help but smile.

Other classic Bradbury themes pop up elsewhere: His fascination with dark carnivals and the mummy tombs in Guanajuato, for instance, play integral parts in �Corpse Carnival� and �The Candy Skull.� �Yesterday I Lived!� is a tale about a slain 1940�s Hollywood starlet whose death relentlessly haunts the narrator: �Her silver evening gown was a small lake around her. Her fingernails were five scarlet beetles dead and shining on either side of her slumped body.� Aside from this obvious Bradburian imagery, the real foreshadowing of an analogy later developed for his mystery novel, A Graveyard for Lunatics, comes a few pages later: �Funny Hollywood. It builds a studio next door to a graveyard. Right over that wall there. Sometimes it seemed everyone in movietown tried to scale that wall. Some poured themselves over in a whiskey tide, some smoked themselves over; all of them looked forward to an office in Hollywood Cemetery � with no phones.�

Another intriguing high point in this collection, when it comes to such foreshadowing, is the story �The Long Night.� Readers of Death Is a Lonely Business, the predecessor to Lunatics in Bradbury�s semi-autobiographical mystery novel series, will be startled to come across that novel�s same Los Angeles tenement building and a few of its inhabitants in this tale published by New Detective Magazine way back in 1944. Sam the drunkard, Pietro the odd little man wearing bells and followed everywhere by his dogs, and the three-hundred pound Fannie Floriana all come to life again, but in a warped carnival mirror�s reflection of Bradbury�s later novel. Fannie�s resemblance to her reincarnation forty years later is merely a physical one, for instead of a warmhearted retired opera singer, she is a conniving astrologist, and I�m sorry to say, an unsympathetic one at that. Whereas in Death Is a Lonely Business Bradbury romanticized her and her surroundings, here �cockroaches flip like tiddledywinks� in her sink. The murderer�s method is similar to that of the murderer in the novel as well: all deaths are made to look like accidents.

Overall, �The Long Night� and two other stories in the collection, �The Trunk Lady� and the aforementioned �Yesterday I Lived!� show the definite drive of a natural storyteller and achieve notes of poignancy. Two of these tales are cited as personal favorites in Bradbury�s introduction, with good reason. Also included in this collection are two better-known pieces, �The Small Assassin� and �Wake For the Living� (elsewhere entitled �The Coffin�).

I think A Memory of Murder supersedes value of mere historical interest, for it shows a gifted young writer finding his own strengths and weaknesses in a very formative stage in his career. It�s a nice companion piece to Death Is a Lonely Business; in the novel you witness the scribe in the '40s banging away on his Underwood Standard typewriter, in this collection you actually read what he was writing at the time. Memory is long out of print but a copy can probably be found through an internet search or among the dusty stacks of local used bookstores. It certainly deserves its own special place on the Bradbury enthusiast�s shelves.




[This message has been edited by Nightshade (edited 04-03-2002).]

AVAILABILTY UPDATE!

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