Celebrating Ray Bradbury’s centenary, this collection commemorates his finest crime stories – tales as strange and wonderful as his signature fantasy.
Time travellers…dark carnivals…living automata…and detectives?
Honouring the 100th birthday of Ray Bradbury, this new, definitive collection of twenty of the master’s less well-known crime fiction.
Is it murder to destroy a robot if it looks and speaks and thinks and feels like a human being?
Can a ventriloquist be incriminated by the testimony of his own dummy?
Can a time traveller prevent his younger self from killing the woman they both loved?
Can the survivor of a pair of Siamese twins investigate his own brother’s murder?

When I discovered Ray Bradbury’s short stories as a teenager, fifty or so years ago, they lit up my imagination and changed how I thought about short stories.

The stories in ‘The Illustrated Man‘ and ‘The Golden Apples Of The Sun‘ fascinated me because, although most of them had a sting in the tail that gave the immediate satisfaction of a new twist or a bizarre idea, they had an atmosphere about them, regardless of their content, that said ‘The world is not what it appears to be. It’s darker than it seems; stranger than you admit. Its real face can be seen out of the corner of your eye, but only if you dare to look.”

The stories were hard to label. Were they horror stories or crime stories, or science fiction stories, or something different camouflaged as something more familiar? Whatever they were, they were all born of Ray Bradbury’s questing, boundary-breaking imagination.

I wasn’t sure I could go back to those stories. I’m not a teenager any more. I worried that I might not be able to see now what I saw then. Then I came across this anthology of crime stories, assembled for Bradbury’s centenary and decided to give them a try. I’m glad I did. I’m not sure that they really are crime stories, although a lot of them are about murder or the desire to murder, but they all have that feeling of being invited to go somewhere strange, to see the world from a different angle.

All but the last two of these twenty stories were published before the first episode of ‘The Twilight Zone‘ was aired, but they give me that same feeling of entering a world parallel to my day-to-day reality, in which something strange lies in wait.

I found that, at sixty-eight, these stories still gripped my imagination as firmly as they did when I was sixteen.

Below, I’ve shared the notes I made on each story as I read it. I hope they’ll encourage you to read a little Bradbury some time soon.

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A TOUCH OF PETULANCE ★★★

How to start a short story collectoin with a bang. A story fit for ‘The Twilight Zone‘. A warning from your future self of the thing you are going to do but must not do. What do you do with a warning like that? It’s like being told not to think of an elephant on a bicycle; it becomes inevitable. And would our hero?/villain?/victim? have noticed that touch of petulance without the warning? Did he really hear it or is it an echo of the warning bouncing around his head?

THE SCREAMING WOMAN ★★★★

A very disturbing tale about a girl who is not believed when she says she hears a buried woman screaming. It’s a powerful piece, partly camouflaged by being told from a child’s point of view. It speaks to lots of contemporary issues, despite being more than forty years old. The message still is, “Believe Her”.

THE LADY IN THE TRUNK ★★★

This reprises some of the themes from ‘The Screaming Woman’ but a little less successfully. There’s a sort Poe meets The Twilight Zone feel to the story but the exposition at the end was a  little clumsy.

I’M NOT SO DUMB ★★★★

This made me smile. What if Lennie from ‘Of Mice And Men‘ was neither as dumb not as nice as he looked? Then he might do what Peter in this story did, especially if it stopped the folks in the town from picking on him all the time.  Writing this as first-person account delivered through the fourth wall, built Peter’s character, added local colour and a little humour and pulled the reader along by their curiosity, like a mark at a carnival stall, until the big reveal. 

KILLER, COME BACK TO ME ★★★★

This was Noir with a capital N. An inexperienced bank robber – big man with a gun but no experience and no plan – is co-opted by a hard-as-nails woman to become the reincarnation of the gangster she’d spent five years with. The writing is rugged, fast and brutal. The plot is packed with action, studded with bullets and splattered with blood  but it’s powered by one woman’s twisted desire to resurrect what she’s lost and a man’s determination to be himself and to solve his problems with a gun.  This was Noir with a capital N. In my head, I was watching Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwick strutting their stuff. 

DEAD MEN RISE UP NEVER ★★

This was strong on atmosphere but the content was a little too neat to be real. I liked the stoic second in command’s calm-to-the-point-of -being resigned tone as he told the story of how his gangster boss was broken by his obsession with a woman he couldn’t have. The betrayals felt too transparent and the action  scenes felt too easy. It was more like watching opera than a thriller. 

WHERE EVERYTHING ENDS ★★★★★

This was perfect pulp. A hard-boiled man of action drawn against a vivid background that summoned ‘Dark Knight’ graphics in my imagination: darkness and moonlight on slick canal water and the surreal motion of simple oil well towers grunting and almost invisible.

CORPSE CARNIVAL ★★★★

If you’re looking for a classic Creepy Carnival story, this should be at the top of your list. It’s a murder mystery with a difference The question is, who murder one of a pair of conjoined twins and why? It’s a solid mystery made stronger by a rich carnival atmosphere.

AND SO DIED RIABOUCHINSKA ★★★★

A ventriloquist’s dummy is not alive. The voice we hear comes from the man, not the doll in his hands. We know that. Believing it, that’s much more difficult, especially when the dummy is telling you things the ventriloquist doesn’t want you to hear.  This is beautifully crafted tale that lets your imagination come to its own conclusions about going with knowledge or belief. 

YESTERDAY I LIVED! ★★★★

Although there’s a murder mystery at the heart of this – a murder captured on film no less – what makes it stand out is the rage of the man who is investigating the murder. He’s not the homicide detective. He’s just the film studio rentacop, but his grief is raw and his anger is lethal. It feels as if he’s being haunted by the dead woman.

I loved the language in this story. It elevated the gothic atmosphere of the piece. Here’s my favourite line: 

“The only sound to Cleve was the rain beating at the windows, an occasional flare of thunder, and his watch ticking like a termite boring a hole in the structure of silence.”

That’s exactly how a ticking clock makes me feel.

THE TOWN WHERE NO ONE GOT OFF ★★★★

This was powerful storytelling. A salesman makes a spontaneous decision to get off a cross country train at small town in the middle of America where no one ever gets off. From the moment he steps onto the platform, it’s as if he’s entered an alternative reality where normal rules don’t apply. The sense of penance, real but unnamed, grows as the town descends into darkness. The confrontation that follows is bizarre, disturbing, and memorable. I mentally labelled it ‘Strangers Off A Train’

THE WHOLE TOWN’S SLEEPING ★★★

Masterful use of suspense.. Our heroine is confident and sensible but determined not to be intimidated by the killer preying on women in her town. Except, peeking around the edges of that determination is an illicit thrill at the danger. As she walks back alone, after midnight, her confidence slowly erodes, the delight of anticipated fright is replaced by all-consuming terror. She runs for safety. Will she make it? Did she make it? That’s what the suspense was all about. 

AT MIDNIGHT, IN THE MONTH OF JUNE ★★★

A delightful surprise – this continues from the previous story, now told from the killer’s point of view.  This is not suspense; it is strangeness on display, asking to be understood but not forgiven. For me, that understanding came with the creepiest line of dialogue in the story, when the killer, hidden by the dark, says:

‘If I told you who I am, you might not be afraid,’ he whispered. ‘I want you to be afraid. Are you afraid?’

Pairing them makes both stories stronger and much more disturbing.

THE SMILING PEOPLE ★★

Possibly a sign of my jaded palate, but this didn’t have the shock factor I think it was trying for. I admired how the slow slide from slightly obsessive about silence to total insanity was managed. The atmosphere was creepy moving towards twisted. The tableau at the centre of the story was gruesome but not original enough to b shocking. 

THE FRUIT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL ★★★★★

I read this story in Bradbury’s ‘The Golden Apples Of The Sun‘ collection, sometime in the 1970s, and it’s never left me. I’d forgotten the title, but as soon as the story started, I remembered it. 

It’s a perfect portrayal of panic, born out of trauma, turning to an irrepressible mania. Reading this, I can feel the grip of an obsession so powerful that it overwhelms reason and compels action. 

What a wonderfully dark imagination Bradbury had. 

THE SMALL ASSASSIN ★★★★

An exploration of postpartum depression as an acuity of observation leading to conclusions no one is going to believe. Wonderfully chilling. The ending made me want to cheer. 

MARIONETTES, INC ★★★★

The concept of marionettes (exact replicas of a specific person) must have been a fairly novel one in 1949, when this was written, so I love that the story didn’t stop with the concept. It posed the ‘What if…?’ , gave an answer and then added two separate twists to the tale, both gleefully and skilfully revealed.

PUNISHMENT WITHOUT CRIME ★★★

A further twist for the marionettes idea. This time the corrupting temptation is a different one. But it’s probably the punishment rather than the crime that’s the most shocking aspect of the story. 

SOME LIVE LIKE LAZARUS ★★★★★

A quietly powerful story about a life wasted, held in hiatus by indecision in the face of tyranny. It’s a story that made pause and consider how many of us spend at least some of our years living like Lazarus. 

Two lines stood out for me: 

“There are some questions that should never be asked”

and , a little later

“Life is questions, not answers”.

THE UTTERLY PERFECT MURDER ★★★★

Another murder story that went somewhere unexpected and strange. Perhaps the strangest thing is that it was and was not a murder story. It was about the desire, the need to murder. It gave motive and means and opportunity. But mostly it was about metaphorical time travel. About the mechanics of murdering our past so that we can have a future. I loved it.