Trigger Warning

I wrote this story over a week in a hotel room, while my wife and my youngest daughter and her friend were at the beach.

‘The Case of Death and Honey’ was nominated for an Anthony Award, an Edgar Award, and a Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award. That it didn’t win any of them made me no less happy: I’d never been nominated for a crime-writing award before, probably never would again.

The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury

I forgot my friend. Or rather, I remembered everything about him except his name. He had died over a decade before. I remembered our phone conversations, our time together, the way he talked and gestured, the books he had written. I resolved that I would not go to the Internet and look. I would simply remember his name. I would walk around trying to remember his name, and began to be haunted by the idea that if I could not remember his name he would never have existed. Foolishness, I knew, but still . . .

I wrote ‘The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury’ as a ninetieth-birthday present for Ray Bradbury, and as a way of talking about the impact that Ray Bradbury had on me as a boy, and as an adult, and, as far as I could, about what he had done to the world. I wrote it as a love letter and as a thank-you and as a birthday present for an author who made me dream, taught me about words and what they could accomplish, and who never let me down as a reader or as a person as I grew up.

My editor at William Morrow, Jennifer Brehl went to his bedside and read the story to him. The thank-you message he sent me by video meant the world to me.

My friend Mark Evanier told me that he met Ray Bradbury when he was a boy of eleven or twelve. When Bradbury found out that Mark wanted to be a writer, he invited him to his office and spent half a day telling him the important stuff: if you want to be a writer, you have to write. Every day. Whether you feel like it or not. That you can’t just write one book and stop. That it’s work, but the best kind of work. Mark grew up to be a writer, the kind who writes and supports himself through writing.

Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.

I encountered Ray Bradbury’s stories as a boy. The first one I read was ‘Homecoming’, about a human child in a world of Addams Family-style monsters, who wanted to fit in. It was the first time anyone had ever written a story that spoke to me personally. There was a copy of The Silver Locusts (the UK title of The Martian Chronicles) knocking about my house. I read it, loved it, and bought all the Bradbury books I could from the travelling bookshop that set up once a term in my school. I learned about Poe from Bradbury. There was poetry in the short stories, and it didn’t matter that I was missing so much: what I took from the stories was enough.

Some authors I read and loved as a boy disappointed me as I aged. Bradbury never did. His horror stories remained as chilling, his dark fantasies as darkly fantastic, his science fiction (he never cared about the science, only about the people, which was why the stories worked so well) as much of an exploration of the sense of wonder as they had been when I was a child.

He was a good writer, and he wrote well in many disciplines. He was one of the first science fiction writers to escape the ‘pulp’ magazines and to be published in the ‘slicks’. He wrote scripts for Hollywood films. Good films were made from his novels and stories. Long before I was a writer Bradbury was one of the writers that other writers aspired to become.

A Ray Bradbury story meant something on its own – it told you nothing of what the story would be about, but it told you about atmosphere, about language, about some sort of magic escaping into the world. Death Is a Lonely Business, his detective novel, is as much a Bradbury story as Something Wicked This Way Comes or Fahrenheit 451 or any of the horror, or science fiction, or magical realism, or realism you’ll find in the short-story collections. He was a genre on his own, and on his own terms. A young man from Waukegan, Illinois, who went to Los Angeles, educated himself in libraries, and wrote until he got good, then transcended genre and became a genre of one, often emulated, absolutely inimitable.