Killer, Come Back to Me
Page 29
Leigh Brackett knew that heart, soul, and guts, I wanted to be a writer. I still had not found my proper voice, though I was beginning to find some of my truths in the weird tale, and an occasional science fiction yarn that wasn’t too embarrassing. Leigh was my loving teacher, and I had yet to work free from her influence, both creative and constricting.
Most of the stories in this collection were written to please Leigh, to get an occasional “Well done!” or, once in a while, “This is your best yet!”
Starting back in the year when I left Los Angeles High School, I put myself on a regimen of writing one story a week for the rest of my life. I knew that without quantity there could never be any quality. I sensed that my stories at that time were so bad that only practice could clean the junk out of my head and let the good stuff flow. In the meantime, I tried to cram as much literary experience as I could—good, bad, indifferent, or excellent—into my eyeballs so that eventually it would jump out of my fingertips.
So every Monday I wrote a first draft of any story that leaped into my head. On Tuesday I wrote a second draft. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, third, fourth, and fifth versions followed. On Saturday the final draft went into the mail. On Sunday I collapsed for a day on the beach with Leigh, and on Monday I was back starting a new story. So it has gone for some forty-four years. I am still writing a story a week, or its equivalent. These days I do seven or eight poems a week, or a one-act play, or three chapters of a new novel, or an essay. But the same number of pages come out now as came years ago: somewhere between eighteen and thirty-two pages a week.
I hasten to add that all this was not mechanical. I didn’t hold myself to account. I didn’t have to. I loved what I was doing, even as a mother loves her homely or ugly babies. You may or may not like my children, but at the time I wrote them, I was plowing my typewriter and reaping the paragraphs. God protects young writers so they do not know, at the time, how badly off center they are performing. That’s what quantity production is all about. The good stories you write later are an umbrella over the bad stuff you discover you left behind you in the years. It all equals out. And, if you love writing, it is all a lark.
It follows that detective fiction, as well as the fantasy, science, and weird genres, was a lark of mine. My talent developed faster in the latter fields because it was intuitive. My weird, my fantastic, my science fiction concepts came as lightning bolts and knocked me head first into my machine. The detective tales, because they required hard thinking, prevented my flow, damaged my ability to use my intuition to the full. They were, as a result, quite often walking wounded. Today, many years later, with a greater knowledge of the field and having learned lessons from Ross Macdonald meanwhile, I feel I might be able to do better. I feel it enough, I might add, that I recently finished—and Knopf will soon publish—my first mystery suspense novel, Death Is a Lonely Business.
Now, as to the stories in this collection. First, the titles. I would like to have changed some of them from their pulp versions, simply because I did not like the titles the editors of those magazines hung on my stories without asking permission. After all, “Hell’s Half Hour” and “Corpse Carnival” are not exactly sterling examples of title-making. I was astonished when the editors let “The Trunk Lady” and “The Long Night,” my titles, slip through.
What you have here in this collection, then, is a record of the way I wrote and tried to survive through the early ’40s, with Leigh Brackett trying to help around the edges. I floundered, I thrashed, sometimes I lost, sometimes I won. But I was trying. Perhaps this collection is only of historical interest to those with an immense curiosity about my work in a field unfamiliar to many, but I can name my favorites, “The Long Night” and “The Trunk Lady,” and add that “The Small Assassin” seems to me to be one of the best stories in any field that I have ever written. It was so successful, in fact, that it appears to have influenced a dozen novels and films written and produced in the last ten years.
As for the other stories, you must read and judge. But I hope you will judge kindly, and let me off easy. I was, after all, in my early twenties and still had a long way to go, with Hammett and Chandler and Cain way over there on the horizon, standing tall, and me on the beach, sweating it out and taking advice from Leigh Brackett. I hope that her dear ghost will not mind that this book and its stories are dedicated to her with love.
RAY BRADBURY
Additional Copyright Information
Introduction © 2020 by Jonathan R. Eller
“A Touch of Petulance” © 1980 by Ray Bradbury (TX-546-513), first appeared in Dark Forces anthology
“The Screaming Woman” © 1951 by Westminster Press (B 308455), renewed 1979 by Ray Bradbury (RE 33 664), first appeared in the May 27, 1951 issue of Today (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
“The Trunk Lady” © 1944 by Popular Publications, renewed 1972 by Ray Bradbury, first appeared in September 1944 issue of Detective Tales
“‘I’m Not So Dumb!’” © 1944 by Popular Publications (B 661143), renewed 1972 by Ray Bradbury (RE 530 473), first appeared in February 1945 issue of Detective Tales
“Killer, Come Back to Me!” © 1944 by Popular Publications (B 635090), renewed 1971 by Ray Bradbury (RE 515 866), first appeared in July 1944 issue of Detective Tales
“Dead Men Rise Up Never” © 1945 by Popular Publications (B 679 139), renewed 1972 by Ray Bradbury (RE 532 207), first appeared in May 1945 issue of Dime Mystery
“Where Everything Ends” © 2010 by Ray Bradbury, first appeared in collection of the same name by Subterranean Press
“Corpse Carnival” © 1945 by Popular Publications (B 679139), renewed 1972 by Ray Bradbury (RE 535208), first appeared in July 1945 issue of Dime Mystery
“And So Died Riabouchinska” © 1953 by 1953 King Size Publications Inc. (B 413062), renewed 1981 by Ray Bradbury (RE 105 569), first appeared in June-July 1953 issue of The Saint Detective Magazine
“Yesterday I Lived!” © 1944 by Popular Publications (B 636080), renewed 1971 by Ray Bradbury (RE 515 874), first appeared in August 1944 issue of Flynn’s Detective Fiction
“The Town Where No One Got Off” © 1958 by Davis Publications (B 727654), renewed 1986 by Ray Bradbury (RE 309 424), first appeared in October 1958 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
“The Whole Town’s Sleeping” © 1950 by McCall Corporation (B 263858), renewed 1977 by Ray Bradbury (RE 7 401), first appeared in September 1950 issue of McCall’s Magazine
“At Midnight, In the Month of June” © 1954 by Mercury Press, first appeared in June 1954 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
“The Smiling People” © 1946 by Weird Tales (B 14711), renewed 1973 by Ray Bradbury (RE 564 255), first appeared in May 1946 issue of Weird Tales
“The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl” © 1948 Fiction House Inc. (B 166416), renewed 1975 by Ray Bradbury (RE 646 100), first appeared in Spring 1949 issue of Detective Book Magazine under the title “Touch and Go”
“The Small Assassin” © 1946 by Popular Publications (B 40949), first appeared in November 1946 issue of Dime Mystery
“Marionettes, Inc.” © 1949 by Better Publications (B 177749), renewed 1976 by Ray Bradbury (RE 642 703), first appeared in March 1949 issue of Startling Stories
“Punishment Without Crime” © 1950 Clark Publishing (B 308181), renewed 1977 by Ray Bradbury (RE 661 301), first appeared in March 1950 issue of Other Worlds
“Some Live Like Lazarus” © 1960 by HMH Pub. Co. (B 866783), renewed 1988 by Ray Bradbury (RE 410 391), first appeared in December 1960 issue of Playboy Magazine
“The Utterly Perfect Murder” © 1971 by HMH Pub. Co. (B 692740), renewed 1999 by Ray Bradbury, first appeared in August 1971 issue of Playboy Magazine under the title “My Perfect Murder”
“Hammett? Chandler? Not to Worry!” © 1984 by Ray Bradbury, first appeared as the introduction to A Memory of Murder