Let's All Kill Constance - Ray Bradbury

Welcome back all. Thank you for enduring my brief holiday hiatus. The book I would like to talk about today will complete my brief Bradbury series and though I have plenty of other books by the same author I think I'll go ahead and save them for another time.

I have been looking for a copy of Let's All Kill Constance since I finished A Graveyard for Lunatics a few years ago, albeit not diligently. On a whim a few weeks ago I decided to look for it on Amazon and found a copy for a ridiculous price. I think my fellow used-book-buyers will chuckle at the familiarity of paying more for shipping than for the actual item. Though I had already decided on an ambitious reading list for my winter break when I received this novel and read its first few pages I discovered the need to put those plans on hold for two days (the time it took to voraciously devour this new adventure). Now I have the simple, nerdy satisfaction of a completed "set." I don't think Bradbury intended these three books to directly follow (though their internal chronology flows the same way as publication order) they do mark beginnings and endings for the three characters I've enjoyed discussing these last few weeks, but not in the way I expected.

I have mentioned before that I found Constance Rattigan to be one of the most interesting characters Bradbury had developed. He had built her as an icon of a tarnished Golden Age of film and Let's All Kill Constance delves deep again into the fictional history of a tarnished Tinsel Town. The unnamed narrator and Elmo Crumley search for the missing Constance from Venice Beach to Mann's Chinese Theater but the enigmatic character who begins the novel running mad in fear of her life is tragically always a step ahead of our unconventional detectives.

Though my interest in the character was what inspired me to pursue the book the further I dug into it the more I found the author forcing me to ask "who is Constance?" Ultimately this becomes the novel's main mystery; discovering exactly who to look for when searching for a person who spent their life pretending to be someone else. Of course I will not give away the ending but I will say that the experience was cathartic enough to inspire me to create a link (since deleted) in Wikipedia's list of people interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

In all Let's All Kill Constance was not the mystery I expected; but Bradbury's stories are never really what we expect. But I find that this genre leads nicely into the subject I have chosen for next week's blog, Sherlock Holmes.
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Bradbury, Ray. Let's All Kill Constance. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.