The Whole Town’s Sleeping (1950)

by Ray Bradbury

I’ve never really been enamored with Ray Bradbury’s writing. For me he has always occupied a strange middle space between genuine horror fiction and hard science fiction that never seemed to pay off for me in the end. He also seems to indulge in that most damning of criticisms, purple prose. Yes, it is very descriptive writing, but almost to its detriment, and for me the excessive description is actually a distraction. “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” is a case in point. First published in McCall’s Magazine in September 1950, this particular story occupies a space that I would call women’s fiction, similar to what film studios like RKO were doing in the previous decade in Hollywood. The setting is early evening in the summertime, while the sidewalks are still hot and crickets and frogs are just beginning to sing. Lavinia Nebbs is on her front porch waiting for her girlfriends to walk with her to the movies, a Charlie Chaplin picture. Francine shows up first, and they head out together talking about the murders that have been taking place over the last few months by a killer known only as The Lonely One. “Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell’s disappeared . . . all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out of their mouths, they say . . . Maybe we shouldn’t go to the show tonight . . . The Lonely One might follow and kill us.”

It’s then that the two women, on their way to the home of their friend Helen, must cross the ravine where the river flows through town. But before they can cross it they find the body of Elizabeth Ramsell. After calling the police, and staying around to tell them the circumstances of finding the body, they make it to Helen’s house an hour late. While Francine wants to turn back and call it a night, Lavinia is determined to see the movie and cleanse her mind of the frightful sight she has just witnessed. Before they go in, however, they stop at the drugstore and the clerk is apologetic because he wasn’t thinking that afternoon when she was in and told a strange man who thought she was beautiful her name and where she lived. Francine, of course, is horrified, but Lavinia is strangely unemotional about it. “Lavinia stood with the three people looking at her, staring at her. She felt nothing. Except, perhaps, the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat . . . ‘If I’m the next victim, let me be the next. There’s all too little excitement in life, especially for a maiden lady thirty-three years old, so don’t you mind if I enjoy it.’” There is some excitement at the movies when Francine thinks the man is behind them is the killer, but then they walk home without incident and Lavinia drops the two women off before starting on her way home back through the ravine by herself.

One of the most fascinating things for me about this story is the juxtaposition with the story “Cigarette” by Cornell Woolrich. Both stories are primarily suspense stories, but where Woolrich has streamlined his story to nothing but action, Bradbury is effusive with his descriptions, building his suspense slowly and then not unleashing it until the very end. “She took a step. There was an echo. She took another step. Another echo. Another step, just a fraction of a moment later. ‘Someone’s following me,’ she whispered to the ravine, to the black crickets and dark-green hidden frogs and the black stream. ‘Someone’s on the steps behind me. I don’t dare turn around.’ And before long she’s running headlong across the ravine toward the safety of home. “She told her legs what to do, her arms her body, her terror; she advised all parts of herself in this white and terrible moment, over the roaring creek waters, on the hollow, thudding, swaying, almost alive, resilient bridge planks she ran, followed by the wild footsteps behind, behind, with the music following, too, the music shrieking and babbling.” It’s a terrifying scene, every bit as suspenseful as Woolrich, but in a completely different way, one that emphasizes description and character over plot.

Though Bradbury packs a lot into his story, there are some omissions that, while not particularly glaring, are still troublesome. One is the fact that when Lavinia is hearing the echoes of the man she thinks is behind her and begins her run across the bridge to the other side of the ravine, she never once thinks of her shoes as being something that would prevent her from eluding her pursuer. Once at home she thinks, “It stands to reason if a man had been following me, he’d have caught me! I’m not a fast runner.” But nowhere do her shoes, with their fifties heels, much narrower even than those from the forties, come to mind. The other thing is that when she is leaving the other women at their doors, they don’t hug. “‘I don’t want you dead,’ sobbed Francine, the tears running down her cheeks. ‘You’re so fine and nice, I want you alive. Please, oh, please!’” And yet no hug after this? It’s a small thing, but a very noticeable omission to me. One description that does stand out, however, in looking at this as a woman’s story is this one of Lavinia walking on the hot sidewalk.

          Lavinia heard the old women’s door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of
          summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on the hard crust of
          freshly warmed bread. The heat puled under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not
          unpleasant sense of invasion.

That’s a nice image--with its frisson of sexual implication of rape, something that is never mentioned about the murders--and rings true, though it would need a woman to say for sure if it really is or if it is simply a man’s fantasy. In the context of the story, however, it could also be seen as a foreshadow as well as the female fantasy of Lavinia, a “maiden lady” who has apparently missed out on the possibility of marriage and by association, given the strict morality of the day, sex. But then the story as a whole can be seen as a commentary on the fifties, even though the decade had barely begun when it was published and was no doubt written in the forties. The title of the story comes from the idea of isolation that came about after World War Two, when people moved out of apartment buildings and into single-family homes. And even though the small town world Bradbury describes was already like that, that residential trend in the country was ubiquitous. Where once people looked out of their apartment windows, used the fire escape as another room, sat on the front stoop and visited with friends and passers by in the neighborhood, now people retreated into their own individual homes, locked away from the outside world.

          Now the lights were going, going, gone. The little house lights and big house lights and yellow
          lights and green hurricane lights, the candles and oil lamps and porch lights, and everything
          felt locked up in brass and iron and steel, everything, thought Lavinia, is boxed and locked and
          wrapped and shaded. She imagined the people in their moonlit beds. And their breathing in the
          summer-night rooms, safe and together. And here we are, thought Lavinia, our footsteps on
          along the baked summer evening sidewalk.

As much as I’m ambivalent about Ray Bradbury’s writing, there is an awful lot to like about this story. For those who like this sort of thing, he collected this story and several like it and tied them all together to create his 1957 novel Dandelion Wine. But the story stands alone, and while the fact that the novel is set in 1928--the Charlie Chaplin film in question is The Circus--would appear to defeat much of the fifties analogy on a literal level, it doesn’t have to on an analytical level. In fact, this happens all the time in film, where a 1936 movie on the Crimean War starring Errol Flynn can also be seen as an allegory for world affairs in Europe at the time. The fact is Bradbury wrote many of the stories in the novel during the early fifties, and while they were based on his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, there is still much that can be associated with the time period in which they were written. “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” is a case in point. The numbing effects of consumerism, the isolation of suburbanism, the reactionary implementation of a more Victorian morality after the liberalized standards of the war years--a similar reaction that happened at the end of the twenties--all point to a way of seeing the fifties through Bradbury’s subconscious, and in that respect it’s actually a more honest and truthful representation of the period than many stories written about the period.

Cigarette (1936)

by Cornell Woolrich

One of the things I’ve always liked about Cornell Woolrich’s crime stories is that they are almost never about private detectives and policemen. There were still plenty of murders and graft, but because he stayed away from detectives it forced him to come up with all sorts of interesting protagonists. The other thing he liked to do in his early stories was come up with interesting ways of murdering someone, usually through some sort of gadget or device that could be given to someone else, unknowingly, and thus remove the murderer from suspicion by providing a rock-solid alibi. “Cigarette” was published in the January 11, 1936 edition of Detective Fiction Weekly, and features a naïve errand boy named Eddie Dean who found himself in prison with a mob boss. The Boss takes a liking to him and gives him a job running errands for him that are not necessarily illegal in and of themselves, but are typically part of a larger overall scheme that Eddie knows nothing about. This time the Boss gives him a cigarette case, even though Eddie doesn’t smoke, with explicit instructions to make sure a Mr. Miller--a guy Eddie’s already been ordered to get close to--gets the first one in the case.

Eddie follows orders like a good boy and heads for the bar where Miller hangs out. Woolrich has been called the Hitchcock of the written word, and for good reason--not to mention the fact that Rear Window, arguably Hitchcock’s best film, was adapted from a Woolrich story--because he builds suspense in a way that few other crime writers ever managed. On his way to the bar Eddie sees a man who just missed getting into the drugstore for cigarettes before it closed and begs Eddie for one, which Eddie gladly gives him. The man puts the poison cigarette in his pocket and heads back to his apartment while Eddie continues on his way to carry out his mission. Once he is done he calls the boss but his henchman Tommy, who thought he’d be dead by now, goes crazy and threatens to throw Eddie in jail for murder if someone else dies from the cigarette. So the race is on to get the cigarette from the guy he gave it too. He runs as fast as he can back to the guy’s apartment, only to find out he’s still alive but gave the poison cigarette to a friend of his who lives in the suburbs. Then it’s into a cab and a race to find the friend before he inhales the deadly smoke. Eventually suspense turns to comedy as he discovers the friend’s wife threw it out of the window of the car, and the great twist ending completes the effect.

Though pulp stories aren’t particularly known for the quality of the writing per se, there are some interesting descriptions that jump out as the story begins. The most vivid one is of Tommy, the right hand man of the Boss. “Tommy the Twitch, who was always with the Boss, shoved forward a chair, like an executioner, for Eddie. A bullet had done something to his spinal cord and he never stopped shaking.” And that’s all we get, but it’s enough. Eddie gets about the same. “The thin, inoffensive-looking young fellow they both called The Errand Boy dropped the newspaper he had been pretending to read and got up without having to be told twice. He looked a little scared. He always was when the Boss sent for him like this.” But even those two descriptions are more than the Boss gets, which is nothing except for the fact that he likes to smoke imported cigars. Instead, the emphasis is on plot. In this case characterization takes a backseat and the characters are no more than types, to be put through their paces by Woolrich. Eddie’s frantic attempt to recover the cigarette is the action that propels the story forward, and Woolrich ratchets up the tension when Eddie is told over the phone what is in the cigarette.

          Only the narrowness of the booth kept Eddie from falling to his knees with fright. Terror of Tommy
          and the Boss was still uppermost in his mind though, ahead of another terror . . . He didn’t want to
          kill anyone; he didn’t want to become a murderer. He wouldn’t even have given it to Miller if he’d
          known ahead of time . . . “For God’s sake let me look for it first and then tell him if you hafta!” His
          voice trailed off into a groan and he replaced the receiver with an arm that was shaking more than
          Tommy ever had in his life.

Fortunately Woolrich isn’t relentless with this kind of description, and toward the end of the story he injects some realism into Eddie’s frantic search. “The long chase had blunted some of the edge off his terror, but he was still worried and plenty scared. He was no longer at the pitch of frenzy in which he’d torn from the hotel to the Adams flat. But he had to get that cigarette back to the Boss.” If there’s a criticism to be made it’s the racism inherent in Woolrich’s writing that seems to be absent from many of the other big names at the time. In one scene toward the end when a black man has inadvertently picked up the cigarette he’s described in an abundance of derogatory ways, beginning with “the big vagrant,” someone Eddie felt, “he could dominate mentally, if not physically.” Later, as Eddie offers him a dollar bill for the cigarette, “the round, white eyeballs protruded toward it, as though it were a magnet drawing them half out of the roustabout’s skull,” and of course the stereotype becomes complete when he grabs the money and runs. Yes, it’s part and parcel of the times, but no less disturbing for it and something that is all the more disappointing for how unnecessary it is to the story.

Through it all, though, the good and the bad, one thing the reader notices instantly about Woolrich’s fiction is its vibrancy. Unlike the downbeat mood of the detective fiction of the period, Woolrich’s stories come alive and he creates a palpable feeling of suspense that is unlike the other great hard-boiled writers that were his contemporaries. The story is contained in a brilliant anthology of the author’s uncollected works called Night & Fear. Unfortunately sales were so dismal that it was never even issued in a paperback edition. Nevertheless, Cornell Woolrich stands among the best of his day with a style of writing and an emphasis on story that is all his own. “Cigarette,” while an early example of that style, still manages to be vintage Woolrich.

The Sire de Malétroit’s Door (1878)

by Robert Louis Stevenson

I came to this story through the Universal film, The Strange Door, starring Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff. But before I let the hacks on Universal’s writing staff ruin the story for me forever, I wanted to read the original. “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” was first published in 1878 in Temple Bar, a British literary magazine that also published stories by Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Arthur Conan Doyle and E.F. Benson. The story was later collected in Stevenson’s first book of short stories, New Arabian Nights in 1882. While the first section of the book was devoted to modern stories that owed a stylistic debt to The Arabian Nights, there were also four unrelated stories at the end of which “Malétroit’s Door” was one. This is one of the few stories in which Stevenson would use his numerous trips to France, designed at first to improve his health, as background for his tales rather than his native England. This collection of stories is considered by some critics to mark the real beginnings of short fiction in England.

The story concerns young Denis de Beaulieu who is traveling in Burgundy during the Hundred Years War. A veteran of the army who believes himself quite fine indeed, he has a note of safe passage but it will do him little good alone on the street in the dark if he should run into troops. After dining he sets out to visit a friend and on the way back becomes lost in the dark. At the top of a hill he reaches a dead end that looks out over the village, but on his way back hears soldiers and retreats into an alcove. Behind him is a door that is ajar and he takes refuge inside, but the door locks closed on him and, even after the soldiers leave, he is unable to open the door. The room is pitch black and Denis is certain that there are others waiting nearby to cause him bodily harm. As his eyes adjust he sees some light at the top of the stairs and follows it into an opulent but sparsely appointed room. There he meets an old man, The Sire de Malétroit. The old man greets Denis like a friend. Denis tries to tell him that he is mistaken, no doubt expecting someone else, but the old man intimates that the young man’s presence there is not an accident. Finally Denis has had enough, but when he declares his intentions to leave, he is angrily informed that he will not be leaving. “‘Do you mean I am a prisoner?’ demanded Denis. ‘I state the facts,’ replied the other. ‘I would rather leave the conclusion to yourself.’”

Then Malétroit tells Denis about his niece, Blanche, and when he calls the young man “nephew” it is clear that he wants him to marry his niece and stay there voluntarily. A priest then comes into the room to discuss the niece with Malétroit, and the three then proceed into a small chapel that is connected to the house. There Denis meets the young woman, dressed for a wedding and visibly upset, “‘That is not the man!’ she cried.” At this point it seems clear that she has become pregnant, possibly through a rape, and that her uncle wants to marry her to someone as soon as possible. Though Blanche makes it clear that she would prefer death to continued existence, the Sire shouts her down, telling her that if she cannot seduce Denis in the next two hours her next choice of grooms may not be as appealing. Left alone, she tells Denis the story of meeting a young captain at church, and her rendezvous with him. After the story is finished, Denis politely brings her into the drawing room and tells Malétroit that he declines the offer of marriage. But the old man is amused. “‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that you do not perfectly understand the choice I have to offer you.’”

The choice, it seems, is marriage or death. Denis naturally begins to draw his sword when a door is opened by the priest, revealing several soldiers ready to fight at Malétroit’s bidding. When the old man leaves, Blanche rushes to Denis saying that she will of course marry him, but Denis is not so eager, saying, “What you may be too generous to refuse, I may be too proud to accept.” The fact is, he finds her beautiful, but resents being forced into the thing, and eventually becomes resigned to death at the hands of Malétroit. At this point the two are able to talk freely, Denis of his own arrogance in youth and Blanche of her desperate desire to be loved. But she, too, has scruples and declares to him, “I too have a pride of my own: and I declare before the Holy Mother of God, if you should now go back from your word already given, I would no more marry you than I would marry my uncle’s groom.” The two then spend the rest of their time together waiting for the dawn and their sentence of death, and it’s here that Stevenson gives the story a not unexpected, but still satisfying, twist at the end.

In some ways, the story is reminiscent of the short works of Rafael Sabatini, though Stevenson lacks the joie de vivre to pull it off. But Stevenson’s tales are far different in intent than the swashbucklers of the former. One of the things Stevenson does so well in the opening of the story is to isolate Denis de Beaulieu in the narrative. Though he arrives at a public house and dines first, it is mentioned merely in passing. The leaf-blown streets, empty in the night, are the real setting of the story. Even his visit to a friend is glossed over to get to the nightmare journey back through the dark streets. “The night was as black as the grave . . . It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town.” But once inside the door the blackness is even more complete. “The darkness began to weigh upon him . . . Since he had begun to suspect that he was not alone, his heart had continued to beat with smothering violence, and an intolerable desire for action of any sort had possessed itself of his spirit. He was in deadly peril, he believed.” In fact, this is one of the most impressive sections of the story, the description of Denis trapped in the black room. But nearly all of his lengthy descriptions are impressive, including the one of Malétroit himself, or this one from his entrance into the small adjoining chapel.

          The windows were imperfectly glazed, so that the night air circulated freely in the chapel. The tapers,
          of which there must have been half a hundred burning on the altar, were unmercifully blown about;
          and the light went through many different phases of brilliancy and semi-eclipse. On the steps in front
          of the altar knelt a young girl richly attired as a bride. A chill settled over Denis as he observed her
          costume; he fought with desperate energy against the conclusion that was being thrust upon his mind.

The other noticeable aspect of the story is the way that it deals with the idea of fate. In the opening paragraph the narrator states that the visit to his friend, “was not a very wise proceeding on the young man’s part. He would have done better to remain beside the fire or go decently to bed.” In this respect there is the sense that Denis is charging headlong into his fate without realizing it, or that only the intercession of chance could have changed his destiny. When he meets Malétroit and realizes he is a prisoner he thinks to himself, “What absurd or tragical adventure had befallen him?” And then shortly after, the narrator informs that “Denis had resigned himself with a good grace—all he desired was to know the worst of it as speedily as possible.” The interesting thing is how the two characters, the strong-willed young nobleman Denis de Beaulieu and the hapless beauty Blanche de Malétroit, find themselves in the same predicament, both of them powerless to control their fates save acquiescing to death. “‘I feel your position cruelly,’ he went on. ‘The world has been bitter hard on you. Your uncle is a disgrace to mankind. Believe me, madam, there is no young gentleman in all France but would be glad of my opportunity, to die in doing you a momentary service.’” And when Denis is talking to Blanche just before dawn he speaks at length about the irony of his misunderstood youth.

          Life is a little vapor that passeth away, as we are told by those in holy orders. When a man is in a fair
          way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the
          world . . . It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as
          Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten . . . Death is a dark and dusty corner, where a
          man gets into his tomb and has the door shut after him till the judgment day. I have few friends just
          now, and once I am dead I shall have none.

It’s not a lengthy tale, and not a terribly inventive one, but it does engage the reader with all of Stevenson’s talents of description and character. Atmosphere is everything in “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” and makes it well worth reading.

The Delights of the Genre

As great as good literature is, there is nothing more delightful to me that reading great genre fiction. Tales of adventure, romance, war, the American West, or mystery and detection are one of the great joys of reading. I already have a separate blog for horror fiction, but I wanted another place to write about the multitude of great stories that don’t fit into that category. Likewise, I already have a blog for classic literature and essays, but that doesn’t seem the appropriate place for the likes of hardboiled detectives or swashbuckling pirates either. While this blog may seem like something of a catch-all, and it is, I actually think a kind of uniformity of purpose can be seen in all of these disparate stories, and that having a place for all of them together, much like my film blog, is far more entertaining to the reader of these kinds of stories than the rigidly segregated spheres that most consign them to. With the sudden proliferation of public domain fiction that has become available on e-readers, my emphasis here will be on stories that were either written seventy-five years ago or earlier, or that are set in those earlier times. Please feel free to comment or make suggestions if you know of other great stories.