Reviewed by CP in 1987, but never published. This article may be downloaded, but may not be uploaded or printed elsewhere.

The jacket tells us that this is Ray Bradbury's first novel in 23 years, which happens to be just about the same amount of time since I finished devouring every book of his I could find. It's fair to say that Bradbury's fiction more or less changed the life of this late-developing teenager. I loved his peculiar fantasies, his technophobia, his poetic style; I knew of no finer writer in the world. A few years ago I re-read the books, and (with the exception of Fahrenheit 451) found them rather less to my taste: the fantasies now looked whimsical, the technophobia seemed quirky, and the 'poetic' style made my fingernails curl. Terrible thing, growing up.

If there is a serious recurring theme in Ray Bradbury's work, then this might be it: the growing up of teenagers, whatever their actual age. His books usually deal with a moment of maturity, the breakthrough to a wider understanding.

The protagonist of the new novel (which I presume is as semi-autobiographical as most of his work) is a young writer living in fogbound Venice, California, in 1948. From the glimpses gained of his plots we understand he is a writer in the Bradbury mould, churning out fanciful short stories for the pulp magazines in New York and Chicago. While stuck on his first novel he meets a killer a few moments before the murder is committed, then discovers the victim of the crime. As he is drawn by his own fear into the crime, his novel at last takes shape and he becomes amateur detective, compiling an ad hoc list of potential future victims and possible culprits. Meanwhile the fog moves in, the oil wells rock to and fro along the shore, the local cinema is closing down, the fairground is being demolished, old circus wagons lie in the canal, a fading movie goddess prowls around in her 1928 Duesenberg limousine, dark shapes loom in the mind, the writer starts to grow up.

In other words it's familiar Bradbury territory, and in this sense it's a pleasing and rather reassuring book. But, what's this? ... the blurb also tells us it's in the 'great tradition' of Chandler and Hammett. (The book is also partly dedicated to them.) A hard-boiled thriller? Well, write off that particular delusion to publisher's (and author's) folly. This is a three-minute hard-boiled egg.

The trouble is in the style, an uncanny and to my mind unsuccessful blend of whimsy, nostalgia, wishful thinking and childlike exaggeration. This used to have a potent effect. One of Mr Bradbury's early short stories was called Rocket Summer, half a page long. It vividly described a frozen Ohio town, transformed into summer as the rockets based on the edge of town fired their engines and sent waves of heat down the icy streets: 'icicles dropped ... doors flew open ... housewives shed their bear disguises' (etc). In this new book, the same elements of free fancy are there, but now they somehow lack conviction.

Almost everything is writ larger than it could possibly be, the effect of hyperbole: it's not enough for a hallway to be long, it has to stretch for a mile in each direction. The demolition crew moves in on the fairground on the pier: 'The war had begun!' People gasp and shriek and beam at each other; about a tenth of the book is written in short paragraphs for quick effect: one and two words long, like messages in Morse, lacking rhythm, heavy on the staccato. And how's this for a mixed metaphor (one of many)?: 'He sat down [at the piano] and laid his hands like limp paintbrushes on the keys, ready to paint God knows what. What came out was like broken teeth in a mashed jaw.'

I don't suppose Mr Bradbury was seriously trying to emulate the likes of Chandler, but the great American thriller writers employed terse, workmanlike language, peppered with apt and memorable metaphors.

Even so ... I think we have to measure a writer like Ray Bradbury by the wholeness of his work, the overall vision, the eye that sees. In this he remains unique: his Venice is like no other part of Los Angeles: a cold, lonely place, populated by elderly freaks, failing businesses, a fading style of life, all crumbling away in a post-industrial wilderness of stagnant canals and dilapidated buildings. Petty obsessions abound and everyone behaves oddly: the fat lady who won't lie down, the movie star who dresses up as her own chauffeur, the cinema proprietor who celebrates his demise with a season of free films. Even the central character is known as 'the Crazy'. The madness instils itself as the book goes on, and the overstatements and overreactions become a part of the whole, not memorably, but in their own way effectively.