A Graveyard for Lunatics - Ray Bradbury

 "...when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glades cemetery ust across the way, which was the city of the dead"

I find it somewhat interesting that I managed to walk into Bradbury's mystery trilogy completely unawares. I talked last week about picking up Death is a Lonely Business before even knowing what I would be reading. A Graveyard For Lunatics showed up at my favorite bookstore on super-sale a few years ago (I will be sure to blog about Point Loma Books at some point). And I am currently reading, thanks to a $0.01 price on Amazon, Let's All Kill Constance.

A Graveyard For Lunatics follows a similar vein that Bradbury began in Death is a Lonely Business. The main characters are the unnamed writer/narrator, detective Elmo Crumley, and the faded movie star Constance Rattagan. The story surrounds a series of odd deaths plaguing a past-its-prime movie studio in Bradbury's faded-glory vision of 1950's Hollywood. The novel has a number of fascinating shadowy characters that populate the mystery aspects of the novel as well as build on Bradbury's modernized vision of the Phantom of the Opera tale (a sidenote: I HIGHLY recommend Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera. The original novel is quite exciting and not nearly as cheeseball as the Andrew Lloyd Webber envisioning, unfortunately I don't have it in my collection...yet).

As a mystery the novel might disappoint hardboiled readers but Bradbury has never really been a genre man. This is perhaps one of the interesting things about this book as it relates to the Bradbury canon. The poor guy has a tragic tendency to get lumped in with Science fiction authors yet this is really not what he is all about. As I was explaining to a colleague of mine earlier this week: Asimov is science fiction; he loves robots and rockets and explaining how they might work. Bradbury presents us with a rocket and simply asks us to believe that it could fly; he is much more interested in how the people around said rocket are able to cope with its existence. The same goes for Bradbury's dabbling in the realm of mystery. Neither Death is a Lonely Business nor A Graveyard for Lunatics are Doylian unravelings of seemingly arbitrary clues by geniuses of detection. Bradbury presents a mystery and then trys to figure out how his characters react to it.

Since we've already established the nature of his three main characters in A Graveyard for Lunatics Bradbury sees what they can really do. Constance rushes around like a hare-brained Hera, Crumley strains his brain to sniff out the terror of tinseltown, and our narrator attempts to keep himself from sinking too far into the macabre fiction of Hollywood's heyday to solve the case. At least this is how I remember it (its been a while).
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Bradbury, Ray. A Graveyard for Lunatics. New York: Knopff, 1990.