California

Welcome to 1950s California, where young Ray Bradbury worked hard at becoming a professional author.  That wasn’t easy, especially for one so full of emotion, so sensitive to the world around him.

Death is a Lonely Business

After high school, Ray Bradbury sent short stories to the pulp fantasy and mystery magazines.  When he made a sale, however small, he shouted for all to hear.  This book follows an Ray during his life in Venice, California.  It is a rich display of longing and unintended fears and consequences to keeping one’s eyes open to the world.

Ray Bradbury, the undisputed Dean of American storytelling, dips his accomplished pen into the cryptic inkwell of noir and creates a stylish and slightly fantastical tale of mayhem and murder set among the shadows and the murky canals of Venice, California, in the early 1950s.

Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer (who bears a resemblance to the author) spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort–until strange things begin happening around him.

Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious “accidents”–some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.  (William Morrow Paperbacks, Amazon.com)

The image of drowned circus cages in the trash-filled canals of Venice, California, both haunts and illuminates famed fantasy and science fiction author Ray Bradbury‘s rare venture into the mystery field. Like filmmaker Federico Fellini, Bradbury is fascinated by the seedy splendor of cheap carnivals and circuses–“a long time before, in the early Twenties, these cages had probably rolled by like bright summer storms with animals prowling them, lions opening their mouths to exhale hot meat breaths. Teams of white horses had dragged their pomp through Venice and across the fields.”

But now it’s the early 1950s, and foggy, shabby Venice is the last stop on the circus train for scores of old silent-movie stars and young writers trying to keep their art and their bodies alive. As Bradbury’s autobiographical hero, a young writer, pounds out his short stories, someone is killing off the older denizens of the tacky city. The writer joins forces with a quirky detective called Elmo Crumley and a faded screen star to investigates the deaths. Their search begins and ends in one of those iconic, waterlogged cages.

Blending hard-boiled detective fiction with beautiful descriptions of this strange Californian town, Death Is a Lonely Business is well worth investigating. (Dick Adler, Amazon.com Review, Amazon.com)

The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit

The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit gives us a picture of the kinds of Latinos that Ray Bradbury knew and loved at this time in his life, some of which getting memorialized in Death is a Lonely Business.  Because of his love of Mexicans and Mexico, this story/play/movie and other stories like it deserve the location page all their own, which I have called Mexico.

 

Green Shadows, White Whale

This novel seems to begin some time after Death is a Lonely Business and before A Graveyard for Lunatics.  While the beginning of the story (told elsewhere) begins in California where Ray gets the opportunity to work with the filmmaker of his dreams, the novel takes place in Ireland (which see).

 

A Graveyard for Lunatics

When fame and Hollywood writing opportunities became a part of Ray Bradbury’s life, the man who saw colors missed by most discovered shades that he wished he hadn’t.  In A Graveyard for Lunatics, Ray Bradbury introduces us to his friend Ray Harryhausen, the master monster maker in movie land.

On Halloween night, 1954, a young film-obsessed science fiction scriptwriter follows a crytic invitation out of the gigantic Maximus Films backlot and into the eerie graveyard nearby, where Hollywood buries its skeletons, The terrifying thing he encounters there thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery, full of all the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power — and peopled with a group of behind the scenes characters even more colorful and eccentric than the ones they bring to life on the screen. Here are the monocled directors, ham-handed studio heads, obsessive actors, fanatical devotees, and one glorious special effects genius — all part of the tarnished golden age of Tinseltown, all remembered with unmatched skill by the masterful Ray Bradbury. A Graveyard for Lunatics is a fantasy firmly rooted in the odd, flickering presence of a city where reality is an illusion, magic is a craft — and death isn’t always the final reel. (Knopf, Amazon.com)

Hollywood, Halloween night, 1954. At a midnight party in a graveyard adjacent to the studio where he works, the sci-fi screenwriter/narrator glimpses the dangling papier-mache corpse (or real body?) of a film magnate presumed killed exactly 20 years earlier. Then a prop man (or his effigy) is hanged, or else is on the run, and another studio hand is murdered. A Beast is loose, attempting to instill panic on the set, perhaps to cover up what really happened two decades ago. Bradbury eventually ties up the loose ends in a loopy funhouse of a novel peopled with a monocled, imperious Austrian-Chinese director; Lenin’s ex-makeup man, from the Kremlin; a gaunt, sermonizing actor named Jesus Christ; a feisty ex-movie queen who demands that “J.C.” bless her; and other oddballs. Madness, blackmail, murder and mayhem spell tricks and treats as Bradbury toes the fine line between reality and illusion.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. (Amazon.com)

Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.  (William Morrow Paperbacks, Amazon.com)

 

Let’s All Kill Constance

Let’s All Kill Constance was written late in Bradbury’s life.  It is, in my opinion, the sweet epilogue to those stories and novels that show us the young man Ray Bradbury in California.

On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge — and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with Constance’s name included among them. And so begins an odyssey as dark as it is wondrous, as the writer sets off in a broken-down jalopy with his irascible sidekick Crumley to sift through the ashes of a bygone Hollywood — a graveyard of ghosts and secrets where each twisted road leads to grim shrines and shattered dreams … and, all too often, to death. (Avon, Amazon.com)

Set in 1960, the book features an unnamed science fiction writer (“what if… in some future date people use newspapers or books to start fires,” he muses aloud). Late one night (stormy, of course), while he’s trying to finish a novel, ancient but still-beautiful screen star Constance Rattigan bursts into his house frantically waving a 1900 Los Angeles telephone directory-the “Book of the Dead,” as the writer calls it. Someone has left it at her house, with the names of those still alive circled in red and marked with a sinister cross-her name among them. Is she being marked for death? With his sidekick, Elmo Crumley, the writer dashes from one storied Los Angeles spot to the next, looking for the would-be murderer and warning the others on the list. The tour includes Rattigan’s house, set on a nerve-wracking bluff and home to tons of ancient newspapers and a spookily decrepit old man who turns out to be Rattigan’s brother, Clarence. Many other eccentrics make an appearance in this whirlwind of staccato dialogue, puns and references to old Hollywood and Chandler-era L.A. noir. Bradbury’s giddy pleasure is infectious; though he throws in an unexpected conclusion, it’s the author’s exuberant voice more than the mystery itself that will have readers hooked. 
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This atmospheric noir novel from sf great Bradbury has a protagonist who could be a stand-in for the writer, a fast-talking damsel in distress, and a host of other odd characters who live in a decrepit Hollywood full of ghosts from the 1920s and 1930s. The screenwriter hero’s proverbial dark and stormy night in 1960 is interrupted by Constance Rattigan, a has-been film star who is terrified that someone is out to kill her and those connected with her past, who confides in him and then disappears. The screenwriter and his detective pals fear for Constance’s physical and mental safety as, one by one, her trail leads to dead bodies. Though professing to be a mystery, this book is more about mood than plot, raising larger questions of identity while providing loving descriptions of crepuscular Hollywood landmarks and citizens. The staccato writing style even reflects screen dialog, and Bradbury draws on his adolescence in California to add authenticity. Recommended for all public libraries and those in love with long-ago Hollywood and its lost souls.
–Devon Thomas, Hass MS&L, Ann Arbor, MI, Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Ray Bradbury home
Ray Bradbury’s California home

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