Killer, Come Back to Me

“I…took all these pages and put them in my talking box. That was the box I kept by my typewriter where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings…so my stories got written.” In the early 1980s, Ray Bradbury used his imaginary talking box to compose Death Is a Lonely Business, an experiment in autobiography that emerged from decades of suspense crime stories told through unexpected plot twists and vividly dark metaphors. If you want to know how Ray Bradbury developed the power to write this late-life novel and its sequels, you must read through the tales gathered here in Killer, Come Back to Me.

As we look back from the vantage point of Bradbury’s 2020 centennial year, the significance of these sinister tales is unmistakable. They are as important to the first twenty years of his career—his most prolific decades as a story writer—as the fantasy and science fiction that he brought into the literary mainstream. In fact, his special off-trail brand of crime fiction found wide popularity in the detective pulps while he was still developing the mastery of science fiction that he would achieve in the postwar genre magazines.

Bradbury’s crime pathologies also spilled over into the pages of Weird Tales, where by 1944 he would appear in all six bimonthly issues. “The Smiling People,” from the May 1946 issue of Weird Tales, is just such an example, but by then Bradbury had already fully established himself in the stable of detective pulps flourishing within the Popular Publications syndicate. There was just enough “grue” in some of his crime tales to place five stories in Dime Mystery, one of Popular’s “shudder pulps” modeled on the Grand Guignol tradition of visualized terror. These include the haunting “Dead Men Rise Up Never,” “Corpse Carnival,” and the shocking consequences of birth trauma found in “The Small Assassin,” all featured in this volume.

Popular’s subeditors Mike Tilden and Ryerson Johnson quickly warmed to Bradbury’s unusual style and the emotional fire of his prose and accepted a total of eight stories in the less gruesome Popular pulps Detective Tales and New Detective. The range of these stories is represented in the collection by “Killer, Come Back to Me!,” “The Trunk Lady,” and “‘I’m Not So Dumb!’” Popular’s editor-in-chief Alden Norton was frustrated by Bradbury’s insistence on letting his characters tell their own stories, but he nonetheless took “Yesterday I Lived!” for Flynn’s Detecti

ve Fiction just before wartime paper rationing killed off that well-respected genre magazine. Although Bradbury never submitted to the logical conventions of crime fiction, his early mastery of the form is evident in two of his earliest 1944 sales—“The Trunk Lady” and “Yesterday I Lived!,” stories highly regarded by Bradbury’s mentors Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner.

By the early 1950s, Bradbury’s newer crime and suspense ideas radiated out into the science fiction stories he described as his “marionette” tales. Two of these, “Marionettes, Inc.” and “Punishment Without Crime,” are paired in the second half of this collection. By this time Bradbury was well-established in the major market magazines, where he would take his murderers out of noir settings and into the small-town Midwestern life he remembered from childhood. “The Whole Town’s Sleeping,” perhaps Bradbury’s most famous suspense tale, prompted Ellery Queen’s Frederic Dannay to solicit the sequel, “At Midnight, in the Month of June”; both tales are paired here, surrounded by other experiments in crime fiction originating in the 1950s and early 1960s, but often not published until years later.

It didn’t really matter when these stories were published; in his mind, they already formed a great part of the foundation that had made him one of the best-known storytellers of our time—a masterful explorer of the dark fantastic; a universally recognized guardian of freedom of the imagination; an abiding presence in Hollywood; and a visionary of the Space Age. But Bradbury was, above all, an explorer of the things that make us human, and his probing creativity reached deepest into the darker regions of the human mind. Perhaps more than any other aspect of his work, Bradbury’s crime suspense fiction reveals what Damon Knight called Bradbury’s prime area of interest: “the fundamental prerational fears and longings and desires: the rage at being born; the will to be loved; the longing to communicate; the hatred of parents and siblings, the fear of things that are not the self.”

Selecting the stories for this collection proved to be a challenge eagerly embraced. An earlier collection, aptly titled A Memory of Murder, gathered a number of the stories from Bradbury’s Popular Publications magazine sales of the mid-1940s. Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai, Bradbury’s long-time literary agent Michael Congdon, and I eventually reached across a far broader span of time to bring together the best early stories with the later tales that document Bradbury’s best crime suspense efforts written in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the process, we harvested three of Bradbury’s noir-era tales that had evaded the earlier collection entirely: “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl”; our title story, “Killer, Come Back to Me!”; and “Where Everything Ends,” the long-unpublished source text for Bradbury’s milestone 1985 detective novel, Death Is a Lonely Business.

The imaginary talking box of that novel, representing mysterious and unpredictable upwellings from the writer’s deep subconscious, is as close as we’ll ever get to the enigmatic source of Ray Bradbury’s ideas. He viewed life as a long rope that “goes back to the time we were born and extends on out ahead to the time of our death.” The moments in between became stories that probe the past or perhaps catch a glimpse of the future. Killer, Come Back to Me opens with “A Touch of Petulance,” the story of a possible dark future; the second tale, “The Screaming Woman,” pivots on a crucial memory from the past. Present, past or future, this new collection of Ray Bradbury’s crime stories beckons. You are invited to follow his lead.

Jonathan R. Eller is a Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University’s School of Liberal Arts. His books on Bradbury’s life and career include the trilogy Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo.

A Touch of Petulance

On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fate, commuting from another time, another year, another life.

His fate was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island. It was the newspaper held by this fate disguised as an older man that caused Jonathan Hughes to stare and finally say:

“Sir, pardon me, your New York Times seems different from mine. The typeface on your front page seems more modern. Is that a later edition?”

“No!” The older man stopped, swallowed hard, and at last managed to say, “Yes. A very late edition.”

Hughes glanced around. “Excuse me, but—all the other editions look the same. Is yours a trial copy for a future change?”

“Future?” The older man’s mouth barely moved. His entire body seemed to wither in his clothes, as if he had lost weight with a single exhalation. “Indeed,” he whispered. “Future change. God, what a joke.”

Jonathan Hughes blinked at the newspaper’s dateline:

May 2, 1999.

“Now, see here—” he protested, and then his eyes moved down to find a small story, minus picture, in the upper-left-hand corner of the front page:

WOMAN MURDERED POLICE SEEK HUSBAND

Body of Mrs. Alice Hughes found shot to death—

The train thundered over a bridge. Outside the window, a billion trees rose up, flourished their green branches in convulsions of wind, then fell as if chopped to earth.

The train rolled into a station as if nothing at all in the world had happened.

In the silence, the young man’s eyes returned to the text:

Jonathan Hughes, certified public accountant, of 112 Plandome Avenue, Plandome—

“My God!” he cried. “Get away!”

But he himself rose and ran a few steps back before the older man could move. The train jolted and threw him into an empty seat where he stared wildly out at a river of green light that rushed past the windows.

Christ, he thought, who would do such a thing? Who’d try to hurt us—us? What kind of joke? To mock a new marriage with a fine wife? Damn! And again, trembling, Damn, oh, damn!

The train rounded a curve and all but threw him to his feet. Like a man drunk with traveling, gravity, and simple rage, he swung about and lurched back to confront the old man, bent now into his newspaper, gone to earth, hiding in print. Hughes brushed the paper out of the way, and clutched the old man’s shoulder. The old man, startled, glanced up, tears running from his eyes. They were both held in a long moment of thunderous traveling. Hughes felt his soul rise to leave his body.