Let's All Kill Constance

Let's All Kill Constance completes the trilogy begun with Death Is a Lonely Business and continued in A Graveyard for Lunatics. It is 1960, and the writer-narrator is visited at midnight by Constance Rattigan, a faded Hollywood goddess who believes she is about to be murdered. She thrusts an address book at him and vanishes. The names in the book begin to die.

The novel is set against the backdrop of a Hollywood in transition, the old studio system crumbling, the stars of the golden age fading or already gone. Bradbury knew this world intimately, and his elegy for it, wound through a detective plot, is genuinely moving. He understood that what Hollywood sold was not films but versions of immortality, and that the machine which created those versions was merciless.

The trilogy as a whole is his most personal extended fiction, closer to memoir than any of his other work. The narrator is unmistakably Bradbury, and the books are his attempt to make permanent the worlds and people that time was erasing.