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Leigh Brackett

kevinburtonsmith

(1915-1978)

“Hawks liked my dialogue and called my agent.  He was somewhat shaken when he discovered that it was Miss and not Mister Brackett, but he rallied bravely and signed me on anyway…”
— Leigh Brackett

“In walked a rather attractive girl who looked like she had just come in from a tennis match.  She looked as if she wrote poetry.  But she wrote like a man.”
— Howard Hawks

So, here’s the story…

In 1944, a young writer of detective and science fictionfrom Los Angeles published her first novel, No Good from a Corpse.

It was good stuff. According to Bill Pronzini, the novel was “so Chandleresque in style and approach it might have been written by Chandler himself.”

It impressed lots of other folks, as well. In fact, her dialogue so impressed one of her readers, the Hollywood director Howard Hawks, that he had his secretary call in “this guy Brackett–he’d be good to write the screenplay of The Big Sleep with Bill Faulkner.” When “this guy Brackett” turned out to be LEIGH C. BRACKETT, a young woman, he shrugged off his surprise and hired her anyway. The rest is film history, as Hawks’ 1946 version of The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and written by Leigh Brackett, William Faulkner, and Jules Furthman, is considered one of the best movies ever made in the genre.

But Brackett hadn’t magically appeared out of nowhere. Prior to the appearance of No Good from a Corpse, she had already had published  a short P.I. novella, “The Death Dealer,” and several science fiction and fantasy short stories and novellas for various pulp magazines of the pre-war era–the usual forum and proving ground for aspiring writers of genre fiction at that time. She was a life-long fan of science fiction, and much of her fiction reflected her love of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Her first published short story, in fact, was called “Martian Quest”, which appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. She also published a handful of crime stories in the pulps, and although she never quite cracked the Black Mask market, it certainly wasn’t for lack of quality.

She had a way with words, and her heroes were tough, hard men (and occasionally women) who knew who they were, and talked it like they walked it, whether they were cowboys or private eyes or intergalactic smugglers. Pronzini considers Leigh Brackett “one of the top hard-boiled writers of all time,” and he was right.

And, as contributor Todd Mason is quick to point out, although Brackett may never have cracked Black Mask, she did contribute frequently and well to such prestigious sci-fi magazines as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, as well as Planet Stories and Astounding, probably the equivalent of Black Mask in the science fiction field.

Alas, after the forties, Leigh rarely returned to writing short crime fiction, although she did treat us to a couple of superb, noirish suspense novels set in the American midwest, The Tiger Among Us and An Eye for An Eye, in 1957.

A 1999 reprint of No Good From a Corpse finally also collected all Brackett’s crime shorts from the pulps in one fat volume, and included an intro by Ray Bradbury, a young writer she befriended in the early 1940s and his reminiscence of that period is fascinating. In an equally interesting afterword, Michael Connelly recounts how Leigh put him on the tortuous road to mystery writerdom, via another of her screen re-workings of a Chandler masterpiece, the controversial Robert Altman film, The Long Goodbye. Brackett, he claims, saved him from a life as a construction worker.

Brackett was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 7, 1915. She grew up in her grandfather’s house in the (then) small beach community of Santa Monica–by her own admission a “tomboy,” constantly at odds with her mother and maiden aunt (her father had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918). She spent her time either in vigorous outdoor activity, or reading and dreaming of far lands and distant galaxies. Her mother forced her to attend an all-girls high school, and she developed an interest in the theatre, but early on decided she stood a better chance of becoming a professional writer than an actress.

Her grandfather supported her efforts at selling to top-of-the-line pulp magazines of the day (Argosy and Adventure), but she soon gave up trying to compete with the pros and gambled on Laurence D’Orsay and his agency-cum-writing-course, where her efforts fell into the hands of his reader Henry Kuttner. The rest, as they say, is history: Kuttner criticized her work, introduced her to the science fiction and fantasy literateurs of 1940s L.A., and even got her an agent–his own, Julius Schwartz. Schwartz sold her first story in 1939 and her first novel, No Good from a Corpse, in 1943.

Brackett married fellow science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton in 1946 (Ray Bradbury served as best man), and they maintained houses in both Southern California and rural Ohio for the rest of their lives. She wrote many screenplays for Howard Hawks, and novels in every genre, most notably science fiction, but also in the Western genre (1963’s Follow the Free Wind won the Golden Spur for Best Western). She also found time to write for television, including one episode of the ill-fated Archer show, based on Ross Macdonald’s private eye character. Her last work was the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, and the film was dedicated to her posthumously.

She died in Lancaster, California, on March 17, 1978.

UNDER OATH

THE EVIDENCE

THE MASTER SPEAKS

NOVELS

All crime fiction, unless otherwise noted

SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS

NON-FICTION ARTICLES & ESSAYS

COLLECTIONS

FILMS

TELEVISION

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Special thanks to Dennis McMillan and Bob Briney for their help with this page. Portions of this bio are adapted from the flap copy for the 1999 Dennis McMillan edition of No Good From a Corpse, originally published in 1944. Grateful acknowledgement goes to Dennis for letting letting us use it.

 

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