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.

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.

Death is a Lonely Business - Ray Bradbury

"Venice California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad."

You may remember a certain book I spoke of in that ever-so-long ago last blog. To refresh your memory: I had attended a Ray Bradbury book signing on the suggestion of a friend of mine before I had ever read one of his books. As a result the first Bradbury novel I ever read bears his real signature on its title page, which somehow made the experience all the more interesting.

What also made it interesting was the familiarity with which I could recognize the setting. Death is a Lonely Business, as is obvious from the above quote, is set in Venice Beach, a town that Bradbury knew quite well and which he paints with a kind of barren notstalgia that brings to life an even less glamorous but still romantic past of a now ultra-funky neighborhood.

The novel itself is a detective story yet it is by no means hard-boiled. In fact the murder that initiates Bradbury's narrative is less gruesome than it is puzzling and less violent than it is mysterious. This novel is the first to introduce some of Bradbury's most eccentric but interesting characters that show up twice more to form a sort of disjointed trilogy of an unashamedly dusty vision of Los Angeles's golden-days as they have solidified in the mind of the author (the other novels are A Graveyard for Lunatics, which will be the subject of my next post, and Let's All Kill Constance, which I have yet to add to the collection).

The two most active characters in the narrative are the unlikely duo of an unnamed writer (the narrator and no doubt a pseudo-biographical avatar of the author) and the detective Elmo Crumley. My memories of Crumley lack the kind of lost-innocence, unshaven, and jaded depiction that we are used to in our noir-stories. Instead Crumley is a man of everyday ideals who must use his brain as well as the help of his writer-friend to find the reasons that a man has been found dead in the submerged circus-lion cage of a Venice canal.

Though she does not play as important a role in solving the mystery Bradbury's most fascinating character by far is Constance Rattagan. Constance is a retired movie star who lives alone in a huge house by the beach and enjoys swimming naked, drives a huge convertible, and unabashedly keeps her old films on continuous reel in her parlor so she can revel in her glory days. Constance has always represented an interesting balance to me. Anyone familiar with Bradbury knows that he constantly explores the concept of nostalgia. To most people an overbearing sense. But Bradbury paints Constance differently. She takes absolute pride in her age and owns up to the fact that her glamorous youth can never be reclaimed. But that doesn't stop her from taking pride in the actress that she once was. Quite frankly I have no recollection of how she fit into the plot of Death is a Lonely Business but her characterization left a heavy impression on me and is most of the reason I hope to seek out Let's All Kill Constance as soon as I have time to read it.
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Bradbury, Ray. Death is a Lonely Business. New York: Avon Books, 1999.