Ray Bradbury's unknown universe of realist fiction

Sixty years ago Ray Bradbury, one of the finest ever writers of science fiction and fantasy, was sitting down in a Dublin hotel to write the screenplay for John Huston's adaptation of Moby-Dick. While the writer, who died last year aged 91, is rightly considered one of the masters of the fantastic, especially in the short story form, his months in Ireland sowed the seeds for a wonderful legacy of realist stories.

It was late October in 1953 when Bradbury took up residence in the (now demolished) Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dublin, and his time there formed the inspiration for a number of stories. One of the most striking of these is "The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge", first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961 as "The Beggar on the Dublin Bridge". The protagonist is a writer working on a screenplay, staying with his wife (Bradbury was in Dublin with his wife Maggie), who finds he cannot leave his hotel without attracting the attentions of a cohort of colourful street-people. One in particular fascinates him, a cap-less accordion player on the O'Connell Bridge. "The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over O'Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quiver, not a flaw, anywhere. The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free."

At first suspicious and frightened of the beggars, disbelieving their hard-luck stories, the writer becomes obsessed by the singer, pondering whether his lack of headwear is merely a ruse to elicit sympathy or a genuine sign of poverty. It's a salutary tale, especially resonant in today's economic climate. Asking the hotel manager how the needy can be distinguished from the conmen, he is told: "Some have been at it longer than others, and have gone shrewd, forgotten how it all started a long time ago. On a Saturday they had food. On a Sunday they didn't. On a Monday they asked for credit. On a Tuesday they borrowed their first match. Thursday a cigarette. And a few Fridays later they found themselves, God knows how, in front of a place called the Royal Hibernian Hotel."

The encounters with the beggars – particularly one woman holding a baby – appear again in Bradbury's semi-autobiographical 1992 novel about writing the Moby-Dick screenplay, Green Shadows, White Whale, replete with tales of Dublin life. Bradbury had a flair for recording the subtle surrealities of Ireland – witness his short story "The Anthem Sprinters", about the very Dublin sport of seeing who could flee the final curtain on a movie before the band struck up the Irish national anthem, obliging the film-goers to stand in solemn appreciation and cutting down valuable post-cinema drinking time.

Bradbury evidently fell in love with Ireland and wrote in a letter to his friend Dolph Sharp (reproduced on the website of Sharp's daughter EE King): "The country beyond town is a long soft green endless Emerald Country, the country around Oz, hills, rivers, thousand miles of blackberry bushes, great autumn-fired trees (my first autumn in 20 years!) and landscapes of such beauty as to give you chills." Perhaps, in an alternative reality, Bradbury stayed in Dublin and eschewed science fiction and fantasy altogether, instead becoming one of the great recorders of Irish life, comparable to Joyce or JP Donleavy.

Bradbury didn't limit himself to Ireland, of course – some of his greatest realist tales are set in Mexico, where he travelled in 1945, locating Indian masks for an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum. One of his most powerful stories full stop is "El Dia De Muerte", Hemingway-esque in its sudden brutality and hot, dusty imagery, about a boy's anticipation at the Day of the Dead celebrations intercut with the primal, beautiful horror of the bullfight and the angrypresence of a shiny automobile bound for tragedy.

Bradbury's non-fantasy stories are perhaps all the more special for being hidden away in his many collections, among the stories of Mars and invisible boys and spooky smalltown America, rather than separated out in a deliberate bid to delineate between the mainstream and the fantastical. Like Bradbury's poetic view of Ireland, they are no less magical and are indeed of "such beauty as to give you chills".