A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Newell Dunlap


RICHARD BRAUTIGAN – Dreaming of Babylon. Delacorte, hardcover/softcover, 1977. Dell, paperback, 1980.

   The time is 1942, the place is San Francisco, and a private detective named C. Card is down on his luck. He already has sold everything of value he owns. He owes rent to his landlady, money to all his friends, and various domestic items to all his fellow tenants. Then, amazingly, his luck begins to change with two fortuitous events: (1) His landlady dies, and (2) he gets a client. The trouble is, he has no bullets for his gun and must find some before he meets his client. (What kind of detective goes around with an unloaded gun?)

   The search for bullets takes him to the Hall of Justice and to the city morgue, and many a mysterious stranger he meets along the way — a beautiful, crying blonde; a tough, smiling chauffeur; and a lovely, but dead, prostitute, to name but a few. Of course, the bullet search is not aided any by the fact that he keeps slipping into a daydream about ancient Babylon.

   This is Richard Brautigan’s only criminous novel and, to the average mystery aficionado, the story will seem rambling and plotless, having emerged as it did through the old, capricious byways of the author’s mind. It is a story not so much for fans of detective fiction but for fans of Brautigan fiction, for this is the popular poet/novelist who first came to us out of the hippie generation and is responsible for such works of gentle whimsy as Trout Fishing in America.

   Inexplicably, his later novels took on more violent themes. This would include Dreaming of Babylon, although, by the standards of modern detective fiction, the book is relatively nonviolent and the author’s fanciful comic inventiveness shines through.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Bibliographic Note:   Al Hubin includes two earlierr books by Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) in his Crime Fiction IV, those being The Hawkline Monster (1974) and Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1975).