By Cullen Gallagher
From: L.A. Review of Books

THE SKELETONS IN Ray Bradbury’s closet are out in Killer, Come Back to Me, a career-spanning collection of the science fictioneer’s crime stories. These 300 pages present a new side to readers who only know Bradbury from such classics as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Published by Hard Case Crime on the occasion of the author’s centennial, the selections were picked by Hard Case head honcho Charles Ardai, Michael Congdon (Bradbury’s longtime agent), and Jonathan R. Eller (director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University and author of, among other titles, Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo). Encompassing everything from the early pulp work on which he cut his teeth to a story published two years before his death in 2012, Killer, Come Back to Me offers the full spectrum of Bradbury’s criminal imagination.

Bradbury’s trademark tone — a sense of wide-eyed awe at both dreams and nightmares, on this planet and others — is as evident in his mysteries as in his SF. The stories here might be of this earth, but there’s still something otherworldly about them. They are populated by visions of future selves (“A Touch of Petulance,” Dark Forces, 1980), murderous infants (“The Small Assassin,” Dime Mystery Magazine, November 1946), sentient robot doppelgängers (“Marionettes, Inc.” Startling Stories, March 1949), and screams and songs that rise from deep underground to fascinate a young girl (“The Screaming Woman,” Today, May 27, 1951). A little weird, a little dark, a little mysterious, and very kaleidoscopic, this is pure Bradbury noir, where even menace is filled with wonderment.

While Bradbury’s macabre leanings have previously been gathered in other collections — including his first, Dark Carnival (1947), and The October Country (1955, which reprints nearly half of Dark Carnival with several additions) — the pulp crime corpus of Bradbury’s literary output has only been collected once before, in 1984’s A Memory of Murder. While Killer, Come Back to Me reprints seven stories that appeared in that earlier volume, what makes the new book so significant is its expanded vision. Here we have stories from three stages of Bradbury’s career: 10 originally published between 1944 and 1949, which cover his pulp days; eight from 1950 to 1970, which are pulled from digests and popular magazines and represent his transition into the mainstream, coinciding with his emergence as a novelist; and finally three from 1980 to 2010, which are drawn from anthologies released in the later part of Bradbury’s career, including a 1984 autobiographical essay that concludes the volume.

It should come as no surprise twist that Hard Case Crime is behind this anthology. Originally modeled after midcentury newsstand paperback imprints like Gold Medal, Hard Case has, in recent years, proved to be as much a historiographer as a publisher, mining the past for gaps in literary legacies. Chasing rumors of lost manuscripts like explorers hungry for mythical treasure, they’ve emerged triumphant with previously unpublished works by the likes of Samuel Fuller, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Donald E. Westlake, alongside early pseudonymous works by Gore Vidal and Michael Crichton. Still, Killer, Come Back to Me stands as one of the publisher’s most outstanding achievements, both in scope and presentation. Looked at purely as an object, it’s a gorgeous hardcover edition, sporting a new cover painting by Paul Mann, interior illustrations by Robert Gale and Deena So’Oteh, and a red fabric tassel sewn into the binding to give it an extra collector’s touch. More significantly, however, it recasts readers’ and scholars’ impressions of Bradbury, establishing his crime writing as a lifelong commitment, not just a youthful flirtation.

Bradbury’s life of crime spanned seven decades. Unlike Elmore Leonard and Brian Garfield, who started with Westerns, then moved to mysteries and didn’t look back, Bradbury never left the mystery genre for good. His commitment to both crime and SF recalls the career of Fredric Brown, who, while 14 years older, only entered the pulps shortly before Bradbury did and divided his output between the two genres until his death in 1972. Like Brown, Bradbury’s work displays the influence of Weird Tales and Dime Detective (where both authors published), embedding elements of the bizarre and supernatural in murder mysteries. Among Bradbury’s weirdest stories is a Dime yarn called “Corpse Carnival” (July 1945), which begins with one of two conjoined twins witnessing the murder of the other. Once surgically separated, the surviving brother returns to the circus to find the killer. While its carnival setting is reminiscent of Tod Robbins’s 1923 story “Spurs” (filmed as Freaks in 1932), Bradbury’s story actually anticipates other carnival noir offerings, such as William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946) and Fredric Brown’s Dead Ringer (1948) and Madball (1953, which originated as the short story “The Pickled Punks”). Read Rest of Review Here