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.