Ray Bradbury, A Memory of Murder (1984)
Ray Bradbury is, of course, associated with the
science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. A lot of people don’t know
he started out in his early twenties trying to write somewhat hardboiled
detective fiction in the pulps on the 1940’s, helped and encouraged by
his friend Leigh Brackett.
These 15 stories were originally published between 1944 and 1948 (Bradbury was born in 1920) and you can see why he gave up the field because, while readable, many of them just don't work. In fact, I found several quite ridiculous.
As he went on and tried different things, however, he
got more confident and seemed to gain greater control over his material.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in one of his most famous stories
(included here), 1946’s “The Small Assassin.” It may seem familiar these
days, but any similar “killer child” story you might have read derives
from the Bradbury rather than the other way around. That alone makes
this collection worth seeking out, as does the chance to see the
somewhat humble beginnings of one of the most famous genre writers of
the last century.
Jeff Meyerson
4 comments:
Mystery was never Bradbury's metier. Horror, sometimes tinged with a macabre humor, suited the young author much better.
I agree with Jerry. Bradbury at his best mixed fear with horror to produce a chilling cocktail.
Bradbury at his worst is as a poet...and he learned a lot from Brackett, about writing intelligent science fantasy (and copied Sturgeon even more assiduously), but his best work did tend to be horror, as with near-contemporary Richard Matheson...and Bradbury and Matheson go on to be among the strongest influences on Stephen King. Brackett's crime fiction vastly better, indeed. A few Bradbury suspense stories, such as "Gotcha!" and certainly "The October Game", also good, but not hardboiled...while "The Small Assassin" *was* published in the increasingly hardboiled near-Mecca of the '40s, Dime Mystery (its stablemate Dime Detective having succeeded Black Mask as the most influential of hb magazines, till Manhunt would have its innings in the '50s...
"The Small Assassin" in Dime Mystery for 11/48.
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