There were a lot of birthdays yesterday, but I was up late getting things ready for the first day of class today and wasn’t able to get a post up. Fortunately, I don’t have to do that tonight.

And that’s a good thing because today, August 22, is the birthday of Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).

I had seen some of Bradbury’s paperbacks in the children’s section of  the public library in Wichita Falls when I was in fourth grade. They were the editions with a sktech of Bradbury in front of a horzontal illustration of something in the book. They were on a spinner rack  with some Twilight Zone collections, James Blish’s Star Trek novelizations, and other books. I remember that was the rack I found Planet of the Apes on.

But I digress.

One day in fifth grade, we had a visitor in our reading class who read a Bradbury story to us. It was “The Screaming Woman” from S Is for Space.

The next time  I went to the library…

I started reading everything I could find by him.

Fortunately, I found his older, pulpier stuff first.

S Is for Space. The Martian Chronicles. The Illustrated Man. Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I began to look for his works wherever I could find them. Unlike today, most of his books were still in print. I continued readhing his books into middle school and  high school.

I said a few paragrpahs back, that I found the older, pulpier stuff first. The reason that was fortunate is because as Bradbury got older and became a respected literary figure, he changed. At least that was my perception of his work in high school as I read his more recent collections.

Too many of the stories, at least to my adolescent mind, were too literary. They bored me. Oh, there would still a story in the older style, where there was less emphasis on metaphor and literary style.  But for the most part, I didn’t get into them.

Those were the stories I haven’t reread since then, with few exceptions.

Maybe now that I facing my impending geezerdom, I should give them another try. I might have an entirely different response.

What do this have to do with the title of the post?

Looking back, it is easy to see how versatile a writer he was. He didn’t confine himself to a single genre. Horror. Fantasy. Science Fiction. Mystery. He wrote them all, and sometimes more than one in a single story.

Bradbury is mainly thought of as a science fiction writer, at leat by the larger literary world, on the strength of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451.

He wrote other science fiction, too, of course.  He wrote a handful of robot stories. I was going to try and review one for this post, but I didn’t have the time. I’ll save that project for another day. And his reputation as a science fiction writer is well-deserved. But let’s not forget his other works.

His first book was the collection Dark Carnival. I hoped for years to find a copy. When I finally saw on in graduate school, there was no way I could afford it. I didn’t have a thousand bucks at the time. I’m not sure I had ten. It wasn’t until Gaunlet Press published a definitive edtion about twenty years ago that  I snagged a copy.

Fortunately I had been able to read most of the stories from Dark Carnival in The October Country. There were some omissions, but there were also some additions. I expecially liked “The Scythe” and “The Small Assassin.”

This is one of the Bradbury collections that I’ve read more than once.

In addition to his science fiction, horror, and fantasy, Bradbury also wrote mysteries. The first collection exclusively of mysteries (so far as I know) was published in 1984 under the title A Memory of Murder.

There’s an interesting story behind this one. Bradbury was never satisfied with his mysteries. The stories in this book were all published in pulps owned by Popular Publications. Bradbury wasn’t able to get the reprint rights. When he learned that the stories were gong to be reprinted he offered to write an introduction if the book would only be a  paperback and only have one edition. Apparently, the publisher agreed to those conditions.

There are compies of A Memory of Murder available online that aren’t too expensive.

A few years ago, Hard Case Crime published a collection of Bradbury’s mystery and cdrime stories, Killer, Come Back to Me. I haven’t compared the contents of the two books to see how much they overlap. They are (all together, now)…in a box somewhere.

I suspect there is quite a bit of overlap, but I think the Hard Case volume has more stories.

Bradbury also wrote some mystery novels in the last few decades of his life. Death is a Lonely Business being the first one.

The thing I admire about Bradbury, and other writers such as Henry Kuttner, is that they didn’t try to limit themselves to one genre. Modern publishing has a tendency to pigeonhole writers into a single genre. At least under one name. That’s because chain bookstores went to copmuterized ordering, where the orders for an author’s next book woud be a percentage of the sales of the previous book. If an author wrote in multiple genres, and the next book was in a genre where the author didn’t have as large a fanbase as in the genre of the previous book, it would skew orders and sales for the next book in the previous genre.

For example, a mystery writer who wrote a sciencd fiction novel might find the orders for their next mystery novel much less than for the previous novel due to low sales numbers for the science fiction.

Fortunately, with indie, you can write whatever you want.

And, though, I digress.

Ray bradbury was a versatile writer. Even if he did try a little too  hard to be literary later in his career, he published a large body of work in multiple genres that was fun and entertaining.