Seekers of Tomorrow (46 page)

Bloch was also proving he could do some effective work in straight science fiction with
The Fear
Planet
in the February, 1943, super science stories, relating the fate of space explorers who turn into carnivorous plants, and
Almost Hu-man
in the July, 1943, fantastic adventures, about a robot whose outlook on life is conditioned by gangsters.

The most unexpected result came from what Bloch consid-ered a routine horror story titled
Yours
Truly, Jack the Ripper
which appeared in weird tales for July, 1943. It told of the son of one of the women Jack the Ripper had slain in England, still searching for him in today's United States, convinced that he is alive and that his killings are necromantic sacrifices that sustain his youth. What makes a story catch on? No one knows. But on January 7, 1944,
Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
was adopted for Kate Smith's radio show on CBS when radio was still king. The Molle Mystery Theatre on NBC dramatized it again on March 6, 1945. It was done again for
Stay Tuned for Terror,
and still again for
Murder by Experts.
Anthologies began to pick it up, including
The Mystery Companion, The Harlot Killer,
and
The
Unexpected,
but most important it was included in
The Fireside Book of Suspense Stories,
edited by Alfred Hitchcock, in 1947, bringing Bloch to his attention and ultimately to the production of
Psycho.
The Kate Smith rendition of
Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
may have helped Bloch get an assignment in 1944 to adapt thirty-nine of his own tales, science fiction as well as weirds, for radio for a program called
Stay Tuned for Terror.
Though the show enjoyed moderate popularity, being broad-cast in Canada and Hawaii as well as the United States, it folded when its Chicago producer, John Neblett, died in an airplane crash at the same time that a major backer, Berle Adams, came down with a serious illness. Helping to take the edge off the loss of
Stay Tuned for Terror
was the prestige publication of the first collection of Robert Bloch's short stories by Arkham House in 1945. Arkham was a publishing firm founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish a memorial volume to Lovecraft. They quite literally made Lovecraft famous with
The Outsider
and
Beyond the Wall of Sleep,
two omnibus volumes containing the best of that writer's works. They had followed with collections by Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, Derleth himself, Donald Wandrei, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Frank Belknap Long, and other similar fantasists. Their books were handsomely produced, coveted by collec-tors, and prominently reviewed.

The Opener of the Way
contained an excellent cross-section of the best of Bloch's work to date, including
The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton; Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper; The Feast in the
Abbey; Slave of the Flames;
and a sampling of his stories in the Lovecraft vein. To fill out the volume, Bloch wrote a new story,
One Way to Mars,
a psychiatric fantasy about the antics of a man trying to avoid being sold a one-way ticket to Mars. It had a polish and finesse which Bloch, writing after hours and at full tilt, rarely bothered to give his work, and betrayed no trace of the Lovecraft "monkey on his back." As early as 1943, Bloch had switched a major part of his writing to magazines such as mammoth detective, new detective, thrilling mystery, and dime mystery. In 1947 he tried his hand at a full-length mystery,
The Scarf,
pub-lished by Dial. Here he wrote in the manner of Raymond Chandler, short, jolting, hard sentences carrying events re-lentlessly forward. This was the first of seven mystery novels, his own personal favorite, outside of
Psycho,
being
The Kidnapper,
an original paperback published by Lion Books in 1954. "Nobody, but nobody, liked this little effort, which is a matter-of-fact, straightforward account of a vicious psy-chopathic kidnapper, told in the first person," he complained. "I think it is my most honest book; there are no 'tricks' and there's no overt 'Look, Ma—I'm writing!' touches. I believe it was disliked just because it
was
realistic, and hence un-pleasant"

Bloch had educated himself out of the Lovecraft style, but he would never lose the Lovecraft method. True, now his themes were conveyed with merciless, naked realism, where before the language of a more genteel school of rhetoric .partially softened his meaning. But his practice was still the same. To tell all. To hold nothing back. To build toward the ultimate horror with every device at hand and then spring it on the reader in its "hideous totality." The terrors he de-scribed had slowly converted from virtually unbelievable my-thos to all-too-frightening aberrations of the human mind. But the public wasn't ready for his brand of brutal di-rectness, regardless of its authenticity.

Writing a biographical sketch in the fanscient for Sum-mer, 1949, Bloch, at the age of 32, was optimistic. The past decade, despite personal problems, had seemed all of one growth. His stories had appeared regularly on radio, a collection of his works had been published, his detective novels were clicking, anthologies were including his efforts as a regular thing, and the booming science-fiction and fantasy field was wide open to him.

Ten years later, at the age of 42, this attitude had become one of depression bordering on despair. Not even winning a Hugo for his short story
That Hell-Bound Train
could temper his pessimism, which he kept no secret. There had been some good things, most important of which were the new tubercu-losis drugs which had rescued his wife from semi-invalidism by 1954. The same year he severed association with the Gustav Marx Agency to engage in full-time writing. The rest had been somewhat of a nightmare. Story writing went on endlessly till there was no joy in it. Occasionally there was a radio adaptation. Periodically a mystery novel appeared. He frequently made sales to better men's magazines like playboy, but just as many yarns were still going for little better than a cent a word. He was on an endless treadmill. He wasn't going anywhere. There was no better-liked man in the entire science-fiction world, but popu-larity didn't seem to be paying off in dollars.

Among the countless friends that Bloch had made was a science-fiction enthusiast with the unlikely name of Samuel Anthony Peeples. They had met at the 12th Annual World Science Fiction Convention at San Francisco in 1954. Peeples' major claim to fame in science fiction was the writing of a preface for the hard-cover anthology,
Travelers in Space,
published by Gnome Press in 1951. However, the field of the western novel was another matter. Frank Gruber, famed detective story writer, was so impressed by his ability that he brought Peeples to Hollywood in 1957 where he became a "solid sender" in TV. Peeples was just as sold on Bloch's ability and determined to pull a "Gruber" on him. Before attending the 17th World Science Fiction Convention at Detroit in 1959, Bloch was feeling so low that he poured the accumulated disillusionment into a dark piece called
Funnel of God
(fantastic science fiction, January, 1960), which reminded readers of the defiant negativism of Mark Twain's despairing
The Mysterious
Stranger.
Upon his return from the convention, he re-ceived a long-distance phone call from Peeples, who dangled before him the carrot of a guaranteed assignment to do one script for the TV show
Lock-Up,
a series built around the career of a wealthy lawyer who takes on worthy "hopeless" cases without fee. The thirty-nine adaptations he had done for
Stay Tuned for Terror
now stood him in good stead. The producer liked his first script and asked for more. Bloch took up temporary residence in Hollywood and picked up an assignment to write for the Alfred Hitchcock Show, from "The Master of Sus-pense" who had already purchased the film rights to Bloch's novel
Psycho.
No one, least of all Bloch, expected anything special from it. When it connected, Bloch was not only successful but
famous
as well. Public taste had finally caught up with Bloch.

With his wife well enough to travel and his daughter having just completed a school semester, he moved his family out to Hollywood in July, 1960. For television he expanded his writing to include
Thriller,
the hour-length Alfred Hitch-cock Shows,
Whispering Smith,
as well as work on Jack Webb's
True
series. Motion pictures credited to him included
The Couch, The Cabinet of Caligari,
and
Merry-Go-Round,
based on a story by Ray Bradbury. It was only the beginning, for Bloch carried with him to Hollywood the disciplined capacity for work that had characterized his twenty-five years of ceaseless self-training. Writing scared, writing hun-gry, with the tools of his craft sharpened to a razor's edge, he had brilliance to spare when the opportunity was offered.

Evaluating most writers in the fantasy field, one concludes by asking: What did he contribute to the development of science fiction? In this case the question should be reversed to read: What part did science fiction play in the development of Robert Bloch? The answer is that it provided the catalyst which made it possible for him to emerge as one of the nation's greatest writers of psychological terror. Therein lies the solution of the puzzling and paradoxical "love affair" that has so long existed between Robert Bloch and the science-fiction world.

Beyond Cavil, the most widely and enthusiastically accepted author to vault out of the perishable pulp paper obscurity of the science-fiction magazines in the present generation has been Ray Bradbury. Product of a field where outstanding literary achievement is rewarded only by the adulation of a coterie of devotees and a few cents a word from the publica-tions, his achievements, notable by any standards, are unpar-alleled.

In 1954 The National Institute of Arts and Letters presented him with the $1,000 annual award "for his con-tributions to American Literature in
The Martian Chronicles
and
The Illustrated Man,"
two integrated collections of short stories, most of them culled from the science-fiction maga-zines. The same year The Commonwealth Club of California gave him their Second Annual Gold Medal for
Fahrenheit
451,
the book title of
The Fireman,
a short novel which first appeared in galaxy science fiction. Those were merely two of dozens of special honors heaped upon him since 1946, as the special quality of his work was recognized by a wider audience. Awards were not the only satisfaction Bradbury received. Following an almost continuous stream of sales to top-paying markets like saturday evening post, collier’s, esquire, new yorker, mccall's, seventeen, and mclean's magazine, he received a contract to write the screenplay of John Huston's
Moby Dick,
starring Gregory Peck. Reprints and anthology appear-ances of his stories have mounted into the hundreds and the presentations of his stories on radio and television is rapidly approaching the 100 mark.

When a new Ray Bradbury book appears it gets serious attention from the newspapers and periodicals that count. No one any longer debates his qualifications for the big time. The question now is how fine will his skills develop and how far will they carry him.

Usually an evaluation of an author will at least lightly touch upon his childhood, even if events there do not directly appear to influence his writings. In Bradbury's case, his childhood and teen years are a major consideration in his motivation.

Ray Douglas Bradbury shares with comedian Jack Benny the distinction of having been born in Waukegan, Illinois. The date was August 22, 1920. His father was descended from an English family who settled in America in 1630. His mother was of Swedish origin. A brother and sister died during infancy and he grew up with one older brother. Bradbury's infrequent references to his mother display con-siderable affection. He rarely mentions his father "who had a job with a power company," and when he finally pulls back the curtain in his dedication to
A Medicine for Melancholy,
published in 1959: "For Dad, whose love, very late in life, surprised his son," it is most revealing.

There are implications of a none-too-happy childhood in his autobiographical sketch in weird tales for November, 1943, where he states: "Some of my first memories concern going upstairs at night and finding an unpleasant beast wait-ing at the next to the last step. Screaming, I'd run back down to mother. Then, together, we'd climb the stairs. Invariably, the monster would be gone. Mother never saw it. Sometimes I was irritated at her lack of imagination.

"I imagine I should be thankful for my fear of the dark, though. You have to know fear and apprehension in some form before you can write about it thoroughly, and God knows my first ten years were full of the usual paraphernalia of ghosts and skeletons and dead men tumbling down the twisting interior of my mind. What a morbid little brat I must have been to have around." He also refers to his problems with youthful bullies and most pointedly, in his essay
Where Do You Get
Your Ideas
in the 1950 issue of the amateur publication etaon shrdlu, says: "One is not very old before one realizes how alone one is in the world."

Many of the tales of the weird, horrifying, and supernatu-ral written by Bradbury are derived from his childhood fears and are set in midwestern Waukegan. The same background is provided for
Dandelion
Wine,
a connected series of short stories issued in 1957, which recreates with nostalgia the Waukegan of 1928. In the 1950's it is a plusher, more contented Bradbury assembling this book, with a wife and three daughters, a fine reputation, a bank account, and a pleasant home. Therefore, the painful is subdued and the pleasant highlighted. Nevertheless, the youthful hero, Douglas (and Douglas is Ray Bradbury's middle name), has woven a few of his horror tales into the fabric, most notably
The Night.
Bradbury's autobiographical sketches reveal an almost uninterrupted indoctrination in fantasy, starting before he could read. His mother read him the Oz series and his aunt let him have Edgar Allan Poe straight Bradbury's introduction to magazine science fiction is re-corded with preciseness. It was the Fall, 1928, issue of amaz-ing stories quarterly, featuring A. Hyatt Verrill's in-triguing novel
The World of the Giant
Ants,
illustrated by the fascinating imaginings of Frank R. Paul, which were more than enough to evoke a sense of wonder in any normal child. The issue was passed on to the eight-year-old by a teen-age girl boarding with the family.