Actress stumbles in, and witty story begins

Most celebrated for his eerie and often profound science fiction, Ray Bradbury has written his third mystery novel, “Let’s All Kill Constance.” The young screenwriter narrator from “Death Is a Lonely Business” and “A Graveyard for Lunatics” returns, a little older and more experienced, and this time diverted from his work by a surprise visit from Constance Rattigan, an aging, but still irresistible, movie queen. When the narrator’s wife, Maggie, leaves town to attend a teacher’s conference, the writer decides to hole up in his Venice Beach cottage to get some serious writing done. In classic noir form, Bradbury paints the night ominous as the writer hunches over his typewriter until he hears a sudden, urgent knock. Bradbury writes vividly and sparely in this tongue-and-cheek opening:

“It was a dark and stormy night.

“Is that one way to catch your reader?

“Well then, it was a stormy night with dark rain pouring in drenches on Venice, California, the sky shattered by lightning at midnight. It had rained from sunset going headlong toward dawn. No creature stirred in that downfall. The shades in the bungalows were drawn on faint blue glimmers where night owls deathwatched bad news or worse.... I was trapped in a tomb when the hammering hit my door, midstorm.”

With postmodern panache, Bradbury draws attention to the fact that we are reading fiction, composed as much by artifice as by any actual happenings in life. As the perfect representation for artifice, Hollywood, with all its glittery dreams and dashed hopes, comes to take center stage in the novel, and Constance serves Bradbury well as the embodiment of a dazzling and chameleon-like femme fatale. Like any larger-than-life movie star, Constance spent her career becoming whatever her screenwriter, director, her leading man and finally her audience wished her to be. With all her shifting roles throughout the years, Constance’s identity remains in disconcerting flux. It would be fair to say that at the beginning of the novel, the actress has already lost track of herself, something Bradbury ironically suggests with the name he gives to her. Hollywood, it’s clear, will nourish anything but constancy.

With the storm rattling the windows, the actress practically falls into the bungalow as soon as the door opens, carrying the Los Angeles telephone directory from 1900, despite the fact that it is now 1960. The phone book has been mysteriously left with her, and since the book is composed mostly of the names of those who are dead, Constance believes that Death itself is pursuing her.

To further back up her fears, Constance pulls out another book that had been left “lying like a tombstone” in her yard. This small black book is filled with the addresses of old friends and old haunts. The trouble is, Constance explains, not only are most of the people listed in her little black book already dead, but she herself had given away the book years before, only to find it had mysteriously reappeared on her front lawn on the day of the storm. Constance points to another troubling detail: On several of the book’s pages, a single name is circled in red ink with a crucifix. These are names of the living, and Constance’s is one of them. The actress has finally convinced her friend that she really is in for some strange and big trouble and the screenwriter decides it’s time to call on his old sidekick, detective Elmo Crumley, for help.

Bradbury’s depiction of Hollywood just as its first great glory begins to deteriorate effectively recaptures the past. As the exterior and the interior of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre reflect, the town is loath to give up its grandeur:

“Inside the lobby there was a frozen army of Chinese coolies, concubines, and emperors, dressed in ancient wax, parading nowhere.

“One of the wax figurines blinked. ‘Yes?’

“God, I thought. A crazy outside, a crazy in, and Clyde Rustler moldering toward ninety or ninety-five.

“Time shifted. If I ducked back out, I would find a dozen drive-ins where teenage waitresses roller-skated hamburgers.”

Bradbury sets his fantasy mysteries in the epitome of fantasy towns, and he does so with more bellyaching humor than nostalgia. His hilarious knack for literalizing the figurative shows itself at its finest when a character is killed by the fall of piles and piles of old movie reviews. The fruits of the imagination are indeed wondrous, Bradbury suggests in this wild and witty novel, but, he also slyly warns us, we should not get entirely carried away by them.