Popular Culture Review Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2011 | Page 43

The Crime Fiction of Leigh Brackett 39 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