The Crime Fiction of Leigh Brackett
Leigh Brackett is best remembered as a science fiction writer and
Hollywood screenwriter: she contributed regularly to golden-age science-fiction
pulps and later to the paperback houses, and she worked on the scripts of many
famous films, including The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye, and The
Empire Strikes Back. Less commonly known is that she also wrote original
crime fiction. In the 1940s, she published a series of short stories in crime pulps
such as New Detective Magazine, Thrilling Detective, and Flynn’s Detective
Fiction, and her first novel—No Good from a Corpse (1944)—was a detective
story. She published several more crime stories (including two novels) in the
following decade, and crime and detection plots frequently appeared in her
science-fiction writing. She was influenced by the hard-boiled school of crime
writing, and her own crime fiction is often implicitly appraised in terms of its
fidelity to the hard-boiled model. For example, it is sometimes noted that her
crime writing “stands up to anything her male contemporaries dreamed up”
(Hamilton 13), while it is at other times noted that she never “cracked Black
Mask” (Smith). This approach to Brackett’s crime fiction may ultimately be
limiting. While Brackett greatly admired hard-boiled crime writers such as
Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain (Carr 39, Briney
259), her own crime fiction is not bound by this influence. Certain recurring
features of her stories deviate from hard-boiled conventions and suggest
narrative priorities different from those of her predecessors.
The hard-boiled influence is perhaps most evident in Brackett’s 1944
detective novel No Good from a Corpse, whose protagonist, Edmond Clive, is a
tough, hard-drinking private eye in a rainy Los Angeles brimming with violence
and corruption. “Don’t trust anything,” he coolly advises a young admirer. His
investigations lead him into dangerous, atmospherically-drawn confrontations:
The bullet hit the rotten step and kept going. The gun fell out of Beauvais’s
hand almost onto the hole. The mist snared the noise of the shot, wrapped it up,
and threw it away far out in the empty night. Clive kicked the gun off toward the
canal and dropped back down the stairs.
‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘Just take it easy’
(131).
Shortly after its original publication, No Good from a Corpse famously
found its way into the hands of director Howard Hawks, and Hawks hired
Brackett to work with William Faulkner on the screenplay for the 1946 film
adaption of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Hawks is said to have been
surprised upon learning that “Mr. Brackett” was a woman (Macklin 220), but
Brackett proved herself to be a highly adept crafter of the kind of “tough” story
that had risen to popularity first in th e pulp magazines and then in popular
cinema. On the basis of such writing, Brackett has frequently been anthologized
as one of the hard-boiled genre’s earliest female practitioners.