The Crime Fiction of Leigh Brackett
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in past or present states of physical and psychological incapacitation. Thus an
Amazon.com reviewer of a 1999 collection of Brackett’s crime fiction begins by
identifying himself as an enthusiast of early hard-boiled crime fiction, and of
Chandler especially, but complains that “Brackett’s heroes [...] seem never to be
in control of a situation in the way Marlowe or Spade or the Continental Op or
even Hammer were” (Doghouse King “eddie denman”).
Across her fiction, Brackett seems to have delighted in hurtling her toughguy heroes into fantastically horrible situations—situations that strip away
insulating defenses. Her science fiction, especially, afforded her with a wide
variety of means by which to ratchet up the awfulness of the torments her tough
protagonists might endure. In her 1953 novel, The Big Jump, a Bogartesque
protagonist investigating his childhood friend’s disappearance during a space
mission is confronted with radioactive forces that sap men’s minds and souls. In
The Sword of Rhiannon, an archaeologist-tumed-mercenary, while treasure
hunting on Mars, falls through a hole in the space-time continuum and into the
Martian past, where he is compelled into hard labor on an early Martian slave
ship, and later has his body taken over by an ancient god. In “Beast Jewel of
Mars,” deep-space pilot Burk Winters is reverted to an earlier evolutionary state,
forced (albeit temporarily) to pursue his investigation of his girlfriend’s
disappearance with an ape-like consciousness.
In a 1944 essay for Writer’s Digest, Brackett identified as an important
source of character vitality, the confrontation with “the realities of pain and
hunger and fear.” Her topic was science fiction writing, but she could just as
easily have been describing her crime fiction when she characterized her own
stories’ heroes as “hard” but “not invincible” (25). Brackett’s primary
commitment was to entertaining storytelling rather than to psychological
realism; however, in service of the goal of writing engaging stories, she
championed the drawing of characters as “genuine three-dimensional men and
women” (25).
It is precisely this quality that some found to be lacking in the screen
version of The Big Sleep that Brackett co-scripted with William Faulkner. This
film became the occasion for a 1947 review essay by John Houseman, titled
“Today’s Hero,” in which he expressed dislike for and impatience with the era’s
“tough” heroes and the absence from the “tough’ movie” of “personal drama,”
and therefore of “personal solution or catharsis” (163). For Houseman, there was
something “repugnant” (and revealing of problems in the broader culture) about
the fatalistic detachment that served as the tough hero’s source of cool selfpossession.
Whether or not Brackett shared this view, it’s worth noting that she saw her
screenwriting as a kind of “journeyman” labor quite distinct from her original
fiction writing (“Leigh Brackett: Journeyman Plumber” 26). She populated her
own crime stories with protagonists who ardently hope, hate, love, and fear.
Often introduced as standard-issue tough-guy protagonists, they reveal
themselves to possess traits—frailties, personal demons, etc.—that rupture their