Goodreads asked Bob Calhoun:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Bob Calhoun Believe it or not, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Sure, Murders That Made Us is true crime and Bradbury's is a science fiction classic, but stay with me here. I'd been writing my true crime column for SF Weekly for months and people at my work kept asking if I was going to publish a collection of these stories. "Why would you buy a book when you can read all the stories for free?" I said. "I mean, all the weed dispensary ads are a little annoying but still." So, I bought this beat up paperback of Martian Chron at Half Price Books in Berkeley. It was some high school kid's copy with note scribbled in margins that said things like, "life on Mars sad." But reading it I realized that--while it's thought of and taught as a novel--it's really a collection of short stories that Bradbury published separately in sci-fi magazines over several years that he combined into this narrative of the history of human colonies on Mars. "What if I took all my crime stories and lined them up into a history of San Francisco?" I thought, and that's what I did. The value add, to use a terrible business term, is probably what helped it get published.

flag