If I've been reading Guy kay since I was 13/14, I must have been reading Bradbury since I was 12. I probably own at least one copy of 99% of his various collections and novels. I'm still missing Dark Carnival, if anyone has a spare copy can you send it along please :)
Ever since I read The Emissary in some long forgotten anthology and went out looking for the original book it was from (The October Country was the one in print at the time) I've not ceased to love the man's writing. I found this on amazon last year, and realised it was a book I'd never even heard of so obviously I had to buy it.
This is a collection of his crime stories that was put out at about the same time as his novel Death is a Lonely Business in 1984. All the stories contained inside date from the mid 40's - right at the start of his career.
It opens with The Small Assassin - one of my all time favourite Bradbury stories in which a woman is convinced her new born child is attempting to kill her. Despite the exceedingly daft premise, it's a shocking and scary story with a particularly morally ambivalent ending.
Next up is A Careful Man Dies - I always thought this story was badly named as the central character walks straight into the most blindingly obvious trap without a second thought. It's also written in second person present tense, a very very tricky form of writing to make work. So tricky that even Bradbury doesnt really manage it.
It Burns Me Up - a murder story written from the point of view of the corpse watching the investigating cops and, for some reason, a whole buch of reporters who are allowed into the active crime scene. I don't know if the rules regarding Crime Scene Investigation were quite that different in those days, but it seemed implausible at best. Still a pretty good story overall though.
Next up were Half-pint Homicide and Four-way Funeral - a double bill of stories about a character
called Douser, an unlicensed private detective who basically irritated criminals into going insane or killing each other. Gloriously silly, but in a way that Bradbury could pull off with aplomb.
The Long Night - this is one of the stories Bradbury claims in the introduction to be one of his favourites in the collection. It's notable for a character who was lifted and transplanted into Death is A Lonely Business. She was further fleshed out in the novel but was murdered in exactly the same way.
Corpse Carnival - lousy title - Bradbury claims in the introduction that it was foisted on the story by the editor of the pulp magazine it first appeared in. Interestingly, this was first published under the pseuonym D R Banat. When I googled this name, the only hit seems to have been the 1945 edition of Dime Mystery magazine that this first appeared in, which also has a story under his real name. The story itself is a gruesome tale of a siamese twin seeking revenge for the murder of his brother. Well written but the murderer was pretty easy to guess.
Hell's Half Hour - another title apparently added by the magazine editor - this one features the most extreme case of psychic cop making intuitive leaps impossible to normal humanity that I can recall. Quite a nice gruesome final image though.
The Long Way Home - a little Gem of a story this one. Vintage Bradbury, a tale of lies, murder and double crossing. Silly at the core but so well done that you don't care.
Wake for the Living - another of my previous favourite Bradbury stories from his other collections. A man makes his own coffin, but all is not as it seems. The last line of this story is cruelty personified. Definitely one of those tales where crime crosses over to horror.
"I'm not so Dumb" - a village idiot is challenged to solve a murder before the local sheriff can manage it. Which he does in style. Nice little twist to the story (even if a tad predictable)
The Trunk Lady - a boy discovers a dead woman in a trunk in the attic while his socialite parents party downstairs. Can he convince anyone that she's real? Are we supposed to side with the parents at the end after everything they've put their son through? Other than the unintended moral ambiguity, a pretty good story.
Yesterday I Lived - a man is obsessed with the murder of a movie star and watches her death repeatedly looking for clues. Unremarkable by Bradbury standards, still damned good by most.
Dead Men Rise up Never - Gangsters and kidnapping gone wrong, with a dash of double cross and thwarted love story.
And to close - The Candy Skull - a writer looking for clues to the disappearance of his friend the previous year at El dia de Los Muertos in a sleepy Mexican village. As with most of the stories, not much of a whodunnit - although there's a nice bit of misdirection before the reveal. I'm not sure if I've read this one before, it had a vaguely familiar feel but I remembered none of the detail.
11 of the stories here I know were brand new to me. Two old favourite stories, one meh story I knew of old and one that I can't decide if I knew it or not.
If you can track this down, do so. There are some real classic stories in here.
Bradbury's introduction is subtly apologetic, as if he knows most of the stories aren't very good. In fact, I don't really count this one as a true Bradbury story collection, for the simple reason that he had no hand in the selection of the stories and in fact was opposed to the book coming out at all. The only reason he reluctantly wrote an introduction for it is because Dell had the rights to the stories and were definitely going ahead with the book, and it was going to appear, even if it wasn't Ray's idea.
ReplyDeleteThank you for that information. I'd certainly not rank this collection up there with Golden Apples, or the October Country, but the good stories are remarkably good.
ReplyDeleteFor a completist like me, it was a great find and I really enjoyed most of the stories despite being his "lesser" work.
And you have to admit that's a great cover...