Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2013 March 13 • Wednesday

Leigh Brackett is an author who must have several different groups of fans. Film buffs know her as a screenwriter for Howard Hawks and more casual movie goers might recognize her from the co-writing credit she has on The Empire Strikes Back. The movie itself is dedicated in memoriam to her. She also has an avid following for her science-fiction and fantasy writing.

The first Leigh Brackett book I ever read was a satisfying juvenile delinquent novel called The Tiger Among Us. It was made into a terrible movie starring Alan Ladd.

After that I checked out The Long Tomorrow, a gripping novel about life on Earth after nuclear war has destroyed just about everything and science itself is taboo because of it. This book is included in the recent Library of America collection American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s.

Not too long ago I read An Eye for an Eye, a Cape Fear-like story of revenge. Of the three novels, this one was least satisfying. It was well written and suspenseful but seemed a bit contrived and treated its subject too gingerly.

No Good from a Corpse is her first novel and apparently what brought her to the attention of Howard Hawks, who, after reading it, demanded that "this guy Brackett" come work on the screenplay for The Big Sleep (which William Faulkner was also working on).

In 1999 Dennis McMillan Publications reprinted No Good from a Corpse (1944) in an edition that included eight other stories: "Murder Is Bigamy", "Red-Headed Poison", "Murder in the Family", "Design for Dying", "I Feel Bad Killing You", "No Star Is Lost", "So Pale, So Cold, So Fair" and "The Misfortune Teller" (which is probably more a short novel than a short story).

All of these works, including the title novel, have lackluster titles. In some cases I wondered if they were stuck on arbitrarily by a pulp editor who didn't bother to read the story.

The writing is excellent, pulp fiction at its finest. Brackett spins a fine tale, has a great eye for detail and atmosphere and handles violence in an understated but brutal way. Dashiell Hammett seems to have been an influence. A character in "Murder in the Family" is described twice as lookling like a "blond Satan", which is how Samuel Spade is described in the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon. The end of "I Feel Bad Killing You" is very similar to the conclusion of The Maltese Falcon, Spade's speech to Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

Brackett runs with the Satan idea. A character in "The Misfortune Teller" is "a battered Satan" and later on "a brooding Satan". By the end of the story, the putative hero is now the one being called a devil and his reply is "Wait for me in hell".

One thing that's particular to her is how personal the crimes are in her stories, particularly in No Good from a Corpse, in which the detective hero's childhood best friend, who has been an enemy for most of their adult life, is central to the case.

Brackett also knows how to play with readers' expectations. A particular incident in "The Misfortune Teller" seemed like the kind of coincidence a writer shouldn't allow, but is revealed thirty-five pages later not to have been a coincidence at all.

How many more of these excellent stories did Brackett write for the pulps? Somebody please put out a complete volume of her crime writing so I don't have to go hunting for expensive old magazines!

The first line of No Good from a Corpse is "Edmond Clive saw her almost as soon as he came into the tunnel from the San Francisco train".

This McMillan edition has an introduction by Ray Bradbury, who was very good friends with Brackett, who was also a mentor to him, and an afterword by Michael Connelly, who relates how the Robert Altman-directed, Brackett-scripted The Long Goodbye inspired him to become a writer. (A character in "Murder Is Bigamy" is named Bradbury.)