Later, when asked about the pioneer rocketeer, Ray Bradbury said: "I only met him once, when I was a teenager and he came to lecture at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in the late thirties ... I was merely part of a small audience of about twenty or thirty who were fascinated with his ideas about the future."⁽¹⁾ What had happened, of course, was a chance recording of a small moment when literature and science (or technology) were crossing. There was no murder, at least not beyond Anthony Boucher's novel ROCKET TO THE MORGUE⁽²⁾ which gave pen portraits of the small Angeleno SF community, but there was a rocket being developed at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena by John Parsons, whom Boucher disguises as Hugo Chantrelle (all the SF authors are given pen-names, too) and describes as an "eccentric scientist". Boucher knew that the SF community listened to men like Parsons, and that men like Parsons communicated with writers, and so he used a failed experiment, described at second hand, as the second murder method in his novel. (The book is thought to be a good record of the SF community, and of Jack Parsons, but not to be trusted on rocketry. Given Boucher's own interests, he probably thought the vehicle should have been blessed with holy water first). And we know that Ray Bradbury touched it, too.

Why approach Ray Bradbury by drawing attention to his absence, and his non-inclusion in the record of a historical event? I believe this is significant because it indicates something that will be true, if not for Ray Bradbury the individual, then at least for his authorial persona and voice. Ray Bradbury when he looked back to the past used the absence of connection - things are not connected to things. His method was to make other connections: to the atmosphere, noosphere, even literally to nebulousness itself. In his late noir thrillers DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS and A GRAVEYARD FOR LUNATICS⁽³⁾, inspired by his youthful strivings to become an author, Bradbury emphasised distance and isolation, rather than proximity and community.

When Boucher included the SF community as the background to his novel Bradbury was not there. Perhaps Boucher could cope only with a small cast, perhaps someone like the young Bradbury was too insignificant (though the omission of his LA patron, Leigh Bracket as well, tends to suggest the small cast theory is best), or perhaps then he was not part of the SF community as such. Certainly Bradbury had started to publish in the late thirties - but he was writing in many genres though WEIRD TALES took the most. His bibliography shows that it was only in the late forties that he turned notably to science fiction and by then that cross-over of science and SF was past. By 1950 he had published THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, but the breakthrough for Bradbury came in June 1951 when the SATURDAY EVENING POST published his short story "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" (later to be given the alternate title "The Foghorn") - he had made the slicks. (As the alternate titles suggest "The Foghorn" describes how a last antediluvian monster is drawn out of the sea by the mating call-like booms of the foghorn). Although he published only eleven stories in the POST, Bradbury is often regarded as the man who made the commercial breakthrough for SF and this was the story that did it.

Now leap forward thirty-five years. Bradbury publishes the novel that brings him back to attention - the story of a young would-be writer, living on decaying Venice beach at the end of the trolley line out of Los Angeles, finding himself in the middle of a grotesque murder. DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS, set in 1949, is followed by A GRAVEYARD FOR LUNATICS, which recounts the later attempts of the writer to work in Hollywood. Bradbury makes clear the fictional templates he is following: he dedicates DEATH "to the memory of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Ross MacDonald. And to my friends and teachers Leigh Bracket and Edmond Hamilton".

In DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS, though, no one comes in with a gun. Instead the spirit of the first paragraph continues all the way through a phantasmagoria - "Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked the be sad. It had fog almost every night and along the shore the moaning of the oil well machinery and the slap of dark water in the canals and the hiss of sand against the windows of your house when the wind came up and sang among the open places and along the empty walks."

This seems to be some part of the Californian coast other than that into which Raymond Chandler dumped General Sternwood's limousine⁽⁴⁾.

Reaching the second paragraph this other connection is clearly made: "Those were the days when the Venice pier was falling apart and dying in the sea and you could find there the bones of a vast dinosaur, the rollercoaster, being covered by the shifting tides."

All has come together: "fog", "moaning", "dinosaur". Readers may have noticed the discrepancy between the age of the anonymous narrator and Bradbury's own age - Bradbury cannot have been the young man, he was ten years older, he would have been close to his publishing contract. So this is not an autobiography - it may be an accurate description of Venice, CA. in the last days of its canals as Bradbury knew it - but what joins then and now is the idea - and the idea is of the world in which Ray Bradbury wrote "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" and changed the public perception of fantasy and science fiction.

There are other fictional yet realistic accounts of struggling young authors in Los Angeles in 1939 and of the geography of Los Angeles⁽⁵⁾. To read these two novels of Ray Bradbury's, though, is to discard notions of geography or chronology, and to find connections made of a more abstract kind. Read ROCKET TO THE MORGUE and you'll find it a Golden Age locked room mystery, nothing like the hard-boiled fiction being written by Hammett, Chandler, or even Leigh Brackett herself. When he himself had been a young man, Ray Bradbury found he had missed being recorded by Anthony Boucher's record of struggling SF authors; later, when he came to create a young man, he did not connect the character to other struggling authors, he did not write a noir pastiche, instead he linked that young man to a world he was struggling to create and the breakthrough for SF into the commercial wider world. It almost seems as if he had no other words.