First published in 1977, Dreaming of Babylon was Richard Brautigan's eighth published novel and the fourth to parody a literary genre. Subtitled "A Private Eye Novel 1942" it parodied hard-boiled Grade-B detective stories.

Dedication reads:

This one is for Helen Brann
with love from Richard.

Helen Brann was Brautigan's literary agent. She began to represent Brautigan while working at The Sterling Lord Agency, and he continued with her when she opened her own agency, The Helen Brann Agency.
New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1977
5.5" x 8.25"; 220 pages; ISBN 0-440-02146-4
Hard Cover, with dust jacket
Black cloth boards; Gilt titled spine; Purple endpapers and topstain
Front dust jacket color illustration by Craig Nelson
No illustration or photograph on back
Initially, Brautigan intended to use a photograph of himself on the cover. A March 1977 photograph session in his Bolinas, California, home with photographer Erik Weber produced several photographs of Brautigan in a new detective fedora. However, Brautigan decided not to use any of these photographs for the cover.

Publisher's information slip included with book reads in part

It is early 1942. You are in San Francisco, and you need a private eye. Sam Spade is rumored to be in Istanbul. The Continental Op has been drafted and is a sergeant in the Aleutians. Philip Marlowe is up at Little Fawn Lake investigating the disappearance of Mrs. Derace Kingsley. Lew Archer is in the army. Who's left? Nobody but C. Card. You haven't heard of C. Card? That's all right. Nobody has.

When you hire C. Card, the hero of Richard Brautigan's eighth novel, you have scraped the bottom of the private eye barrel. But you won't be bored. No, indeed. Because when C. Card finds some bullets for his gun, you will be in for some fast, funny, slam-bang private eye adventures. Unless of course C. Card starts dreaming of Babylon. If C. Card starts thinking of Babylon, all bets are off.

Not since Trout Fishing in America has Brautigan so successfully combined his wild sense of humor with the incredible poetic imagination he is rightfully famous for around the world. The adventures of seedy, not-too-bright C. Card, as he carefully wends his way between fantasy and reality. Babylon and San Francisco, are a delight to both the mind and the heart. Richard Brautigan is forty-two years old and has written eighteen books. He is an internationally known author whose works have been translated into fifteen languages. In the Spring of 1978, he will publish a volume of poetry called June 30th, June 30th.

Advance uncorrected proofs in yellow printed wrappers
220 pages
Publisher's information slip laid into review copies states publication date of 27 September 1977.

Copy inscribed to Seymour Lawrence

This copy is for Sam Lawrence
wishing him a happy 1978
Richard Brautigan
San Francisco
December 21, 1977

Edition inscribed is First Edition, hardbound, 1977.

Lawrence published several of Brautigan's books, starting with the collection of Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar in 1969.

• Cape
• Dell
• Delta
• Mifflin/Lawrence
• Picador

• Catalan
• Danish
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Spanish
• Turkish

In addition to the specific reviews detailed below, commentary about this book may also be included in General Reviews of Brautigan's work and his place in American literature, or reviews of his Collections.

Brautigan's latest is a spoof of [Dashiell] Hammett, [Raymond] Chandler, et al.: a period detective piece that takes place in the San Francisco of 1942. . . . [M]ore like a parody than sincere imitation; the whimsy is, by now, getting as tiresome as sixties' cant. . . . [I]t is time someone gave the Brautigan turntable a kick, it is beginning to stick in a most familiar groove.

[U]npredictable Richard Brautigan at his very breeziest. . . . The deceptively simple sentences, the two-page chapters, and the surface amusements generate about the fastest 220 pages you'll ever read—leaving lots of extra time to wonder what, if anything, it all meant.

The Dick-and-Jane prose style is undistinguished, and the deadpan narration by the first person hero is humorless. I don't doubt that Brautigan had a good time writing this book, but I had a bad time reading it.

Brautigan tells his whimsical little tale in dozens of short chapters that will add up to something meaningful to those initiated into Brautigan land and lore.

Publishers Weekly 14 August 1978: 68.

Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon is a short comedy-thriller, made even shorter by being divided into some 80 three-page chapters, thus leaving plenty of white space throughout. It is also thin—an attenuated tale of wartime San Francisco, where a luckless medically unfit private eye commissioned to steal a corpse from the morgue is continually hindered by his day-dreaming fantasies of life in old Babylon with a swinging Nebuchadnezzar and a lovely handmaiden Nana-dirat. Mildly funny, hardly ever thrilling, it is quite endearing in its eccentric, self-indulgent fashion but something of a let-down from the author of Trout Fishing in America.

[Dreaming of Babylon] is a sleek but sophomoric parody, and that's about it.

READ this review, in French.

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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 9. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978. 123-25.
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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 9. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978. 123-25.

Brautigan's linguistic antics and gallows humor are extremely apt in his "perverse mysteries." Babylon upends the conventional private eye novel. It also wreaks havoc with the line between fantasy and reality. The hapless hero, C. Card, has hit the skids as a private investigator; he spends half his time trying to rustle up some bullets for his gun and the other half resisting the inducements of an imaginary, perfect world. A masterful comedy mixed with pathos.

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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 42. Eds. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 48-66.
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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 12. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 57-74.
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These four narrators are in deep trouble. Victims or witnesses of the most macabre and horrifying possibilities that modern life—particularly American life—allows, they are hanging on like grim death to a sense of themselves. But selfhood is violently at risk in these doom-laden thrillers; there is no room for heroes or heroines, and probably not even for human beings, any more.

[Discusses Gore Vidal's Kalki and MacDonald Harris's Yukiko.]

Harris's authenticity and Vidal's grown-up inventiveness make Brautigan look childish. His rules are too restrictive; his convention of negating or parodying all conventions has become tiresomely rigid. This winsome pastiche of Chandler only makes one yearn for Chandler's own solidity of plot and complexity of characters, attributes which a freewheeling minimalist fiction cannot afford. Instead, bijou chapterettes, not long enough to look serious, tell the story strip-cartoon style. Set in San Francisco, 1942, it follows the misfortunes of a hopeless but cute private-eye with no bullets to his gun, unable to concentrate because he's always dreaming of being a champion baseball player in 596 BC, who's employed by a daunting blonde to steal a corpse from a one-legged morgue attendant but is prevented by the ruthless Sergeant Rink, who quells his opponents by shutting them in the morgue ice-box with the stiffs. And so on.

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Skulking through the bizarre underworld on the human consciousness, Brautigan describes a day in the life of private detective C. Card (as in "Seek Hard?"). The hero is sitting out World War II thanks to an ignominious injury suffered in the Spanish Civil War, when he imprudently planted his posterior on a pistol while answering nature's call. Card is a failure, his attempts to subsist above poverty level constantly interrupted by Walter Mitty-ish daydreams. Hired to steal the body of a murdered prostitute from the local morgue, the hero encounters a host of body-snatchers enlisted to perform the same deed. After a battery of harrowing escapades, Card emerges in possession of the body. Unfortunately, his prize goes unclaimed, and he's left not with a handsome monetary reward, but with the corpse of a beautiful young woman languishing in his refrigerator. Like previous efforts by the author, this is an entertaining, provocative fantasy which should delight and intrigue a whole range of readers.

Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 9. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978. 123-25.

Here we have the whimsical old drawler at it again, spilling out a trail of goofy inconsequences about a man who plays at being a private detective. . . . For those who delight in this author's strenuously ingratiating facetiousness, another welcome offering; for the rest of us, another piece of inexplicable cultism.

The latest established writer to try his hand at the private eye novel is Richard Brautigan. His admirers would argue that Dreaming of Babylon isn't a private eye novel at all, despite an explicit statement on the dust jacket to this effect, and as one would expect from the author of Trout Fishing in America, private eye C. Card doesn't prove to be competent, or even real. But he is amusing, and the writing has its unattractive yet effective moments. "God had done him a favor when He stalled his car one rainy night on some railroad tracks just outside of Merced. He had been a traveling salesman: brushes. After the train hit his car they couldn't tell the difference between him and his brushes. I think they buried him with some of his brushes in the coffin, believing they were part of him." Much of it is a parody of the hard boiled: "He looked as if he'd get a lot of pleasure out of going ten rounds with your grandmother and making sure she went the whole distance. Afterwards you could take her home in a gallon jar." Some is irredeemably vulgar: the coffee offered by the morgue attendant tastes "like he got it out of the asshole of one of his corpse friends." Some of it is just right: a cop, not fat, tells a rich lady that if she will tell all he will make it easy on her, and she froths forth with: "Listen, fat cop. First, these handcuffs are too tight. Second, I want a beer. Third, I'm rich and it's already easy for me." But I don't think that Brautigan is likely to come this way again.