Source: Wikipedia

Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) was a writer of fantasy and science fiction, mystery novels and - best known to the general public - Hollywood screenplays, most notably The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) She received the Hugo award posthumously for this in 1981. The last was a departure for Brackett, since until then, all of her science fiction had been in the form of novels and short stories rather than screenplays.

Leigh Douglass Brackett was born in Los Angeles, California. Her first published science fiction story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her first novel, "No Good from a Corpse", published in 1944, was a hard-boiled mystery novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler. Hollywood director Howard Hawks was so impressed by this novel that he had his secretary call in "this guy Brackett" to help William Faulkner write the script for The Big Sleep (1946). The film, 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.

In 1946, Brackett married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton, and may well have had a positive influence on the quality of his own writing, given that the characters in his own Captain Future series became more complex after the marriage. In the same year, Planet Stories published one of Brackett's most influential short fiction works, the novella "Lorelei of the Red Mist", a collaboration with Ray Bradbury, featuring Eric John Stark, Brackett's hallmark science fiction character.

Her crime writing career spanned 1944 to 1969 but she only produced five novels, ghost-writing one for the actor George Sanders (as did Craig Rice). See http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/brackett.htm for a detailed description of her career.

Mike Grost on Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett was an occasional writer of detective fiction, in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler. Two of the stories I have read, including the well done "So Pale, So Cold, So Fair" (1957), deal with a man who cleans up a crooked town. This is basically similar to the plot subjects of her Howard Hawks movie westerns, Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1967). In an earlier tale, the overly gruesome and morbid "I Feel Bad Killing You" (1944), she calls her crooked area the Surfside Division of L.A., an obvious homage to Raymond Chandler, who created "Bay City" as the ultimate town run by crooked cops, in Farewell My Lovely (1940). Chandler's original was Santa Monica, now a lovely beach community near L.A., but at the time a notoriously corrupt burg. (Two of my favorite films were shot there, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) and Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1960).) No one in Chandler succeeds in cleaning the city up: it just sits there and festers. Brackett takes the opposite approach, one that seems more in tune with traditional Westerns, such as Destry Rides Again (1939), in which the hero reforms the whole crooked town. Brackett clearly is expressing a personal vision here. Her fiction is emotionally sensitive, and deals with men who are trying to find renewed meaning in their lives. She also pays attention to plot logic, and includes real mysteries in both tales. I think the second, 1957 tale is much better than the first 1944 one, and I also enjoyed her 1960's film scripts such as Hatari! and El Dorado much more than her 1940's adaptation of The Big Sleep. Brackett seemed to grow as a writer as she got older.

"Design for Dying" (1944) is a melodrama about gangsters. In many ways this tale resembles a whole gangster movie of the era, and one can easily imagine it being made into a snappy film. The hero is even compared with Humphrey Bogart. Perhaps Brackett had a film dramatization in mind when she wrote it. It seems especially close in plot and mood to Raoul Walsh's film High Sierra (1941), with an aging gangster out of prison after many years finding conflicts with today's mobsters. The story is also full of the sort of intricate action scenes that were popular in the pulps, and which go back to Hammett and Daly. "Design for Dying" is not structured as a puzzle plot mystery: it seems to be a non-mystery oriented crime story. However, surprising connections keep emerging in the tale, and the technique of the story construction as a whole has close ties to the puzzle plot tale.

Detective Bibliography

No Good from a Corpse (1944)

Stranger at Home (1946) as ghost writer for the actor George Sanders

An Eye For an Eye (1957)

The Tiger Among Us (1957) aka Fear No Evil

Silent Partner (1969)