“The big surf, the biggest wave, coming in, now,” murmured Henry. “And bringing something with it.”
Way out, the seals barked.
Way out, a huge wave curled.
Crumley, Fritz, Henry, Maggie, and I held our breath.
And the wave came in.
About the Author
In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, 2011, at the age of 91, inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screen play for John Huston’s classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television’s The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy Award for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.
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Ray Bradbury and Let’s All Kill Constance
“In this wild and witty novel … Hollywood, with all its glittery dreams and dashed hopes, comes to take center stage … 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 … The fruits of the imagination are indeed wondrous.”
Los Angeles Times
“Ray Bradbury has [written] a quirky mystery tale peopled with the ghosts of long-forgotten Hollywood … The mystery slowly reveals itself like a flickering projector in a darkened theater. [Bradbury’s] got a gift for dialogue, for writing words that bellow, trip, shout, and whisper from characters’ mouths.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Delightful … bizarre … Any new Bradbury novel is a cause for celebration … Bradbury’s gift for language is as strong as ever.”
Denver Rocky Mountain News
“Almost no one can imagine a time or place without the fiction of Ray Bradbury. It’s as if he’s always been with us, his books always fresh on the shelf … His stories and novels are part of the American language.”
Washington Post
“Pleasantly weird at the best of times, Hollywood presents a truly eerie face in Let’s All Kill Constance … Characters so bizarre they could never live outside a writer’s imagination.”
New York Times Book Review
“A loving, tongue-in-cheek tribute to early Hollywood … [a] whirlwind of staccato dialogue, puns, and references to old Hollywood and Chandler-era noir … Bradbury, a legend in his own time, seems never to run out of creative inspiration … [His] giddy pleasure is infectious.”
Publishers Weekly
“A wonderful storyteller … Nearly everything he has written is sheer poetry.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A crackerjack tale full of sly wit and gentle insight … Filled with lighthearted satire, longing for better times, and hope for the future, Let’s All Kill Constance is a terrific blend of mystery noir and comedy of manners—all written with tongue often firmly planted in cheek … Bradbury’s banter is still as witty as ever.”
Denver Post
“There is no simpler, yet deeper, stylist than Bradbury. Out of the plainest of words he creates images and moods that readers seem to carry with them forever.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Bradbury has a style all his own, much imitated but never matched … After writing for more than fifty years, Bradbury has become more than pretty good at it. He has become a master.”
Portland Oregonian
“This book … raises larger questions of identity while providing loving descriptions of crepuscular Hollywood landmarks … Recommended for all … those in love with long-ago Hollywood and its lost souls.”
Library Journal
“Another winner from Ray Bradbury … a talented, versatile writer whose humor is apparent throughout the book … Let’s All Kill Constance hooks readers from the very first words … Billed as a mystery, [it] is also part commentary on fame, part search for identity, part a tale of undoing our past so we can claim our present … In the end, this is as much a tale of courage and redemption as it is a sweetly mocking story of fame’s twisted fortunes. A worthy read from an incredible writer … [Bradbury] never ceases to amaze.”
Asbury Park Press
“The best author in the entire world … He leaves you in total wonderment.”
Anchorage Daily News
“Engaging … Hollywood noir … [Bradbury] appears to be sending up the detective genre of Hammet and Chandler, and the notion of genre in general … Let’s All Kill Constance is something more interesting: a meditation on the eruptions of old age, on memory, on failed and realized aspirations … a memoir disguised as a parody of genre.”
Baltimore Sun
“Bradbury is an authentic original.”
Time
“A lighthearted but adventurous mystery … The banter between his characters is … as sharp and witty as the lines spoken by Tracy and Hepburn in some of their finer films … Like those screwball comedies which he so obviously loves, the fiction of Ray Bradbury—be it lighthearted or dark and stormy—will endure for many years to come.”
Austin American-Statesman
“A tale of old Hollywood glamour, sharp satire about the movie world. It is also disturbing, because a world that once included the larger-than-life Dietrich, Valentino, and Harlow is now a graveyard.”
Salt Lake City Deseret News
“Not everyone can get away with starting his tale with: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ Bradbury acknowledges his impudence by asking whether that’s any way to grab the attention of readers. It is.”
Bergen Record
“Bradbury’s gentle, poetic style is about people and language—the stuff of classic literature … Ray Bradbury, no question, is back to his creative, prolific, sentimental, philosophical, optimistic, irascible ways.”
Chicago Tribune
Also by Ray Bradbury
Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines
Bradbury Stories
Dandelion Wine
Dark Carnival
Death Is a Lonely Business
Driving Blind
Fahrenheit 451
From the Dust Returned
The Golden Apples of the Sun
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Green Shadows, White Whale
The Halloween Tree
I Sing the Body Electric!
The Illustrated Man
Journey to Far Metaphor
Kaleidoscope
Long After Midnight
The Machineries of Joy
The Martian Chronicles
A Medicine for Melancholy
The October Country
One More for the Road
One Timeless Spring
Quicker Than the Eye
R Is for Rocket
S Is for Space
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
The Toynbee Convector
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Witness and Celebrate
Yestermorrow
Zen in the Art of Writing
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AVON BOOKS
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Copyright © 2003 by Ray Bradbury
ISBN: 0-06-056178-5
Epub Edition © MAY 2013 ISBN: 9780062242341
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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Avon Books paperback printing: January 2004
First William Morrow hardcover printing: January 2003
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Ray Bradbury, Let's All Kill Constance
(Series: Crumley Mysteries # 3)
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