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Popular Culture Review
veneer of cool and propel character transformation. Clive Edmond of No Good
from a Corpse struggles to make his peace with past personal betrayals. The
protagonists of “I Feel Bad Killing You,” “So Pale, So Cold, So Fair,” and
Stranger at Home must overcome the psychological damage of past violent
victimization in order to successfully pursue their investigations.
Years later, in praising Robert E. Howard’s fantasy novel Sword Woman,
Brackett notes Howard’s “blow-by-blow” account of the protagonist’s character
development, contrasting Howard’s Agnes with Catherine L. Moore’s Jirel of
Joiry, in which “we never really know why or how she came to be a sword
woman” (6). Brackett does not present this as a critique of Moore, but her
comments do suggest that she found the distinction meaningful. It certainly
seems to have informed her own writing, in which she endowed even her most
thinly drawn heroes with back stories. For example, in her 1943 story “The
Halfling,” murders in an interplanetary carnival are investigated by a fairly
standard wise-cracking and self-interested protagonist, but Brackett opens the
story with him reflecting on his boyhood pleasures and dreams, now lost.
Similarly, the Chandleresque detective hero of No Good from a Corpse has his
toughness perforated by elegiacal interludes in which we leam about him before
the onset of cynicism, as an innocent “boy in overalls who had not seen anything
yet but the brightness and the cleanness and the soaring gulls” (1 2 8 ).
National University, San Diego
Christine Photinos
Works Cited
Brackett, Leigh. The Big Jump. 1955. New York: Tor, 1987. Print.
— . An Eye for an Eye. 1957. New York: Bantam Books, 1961. Print.
— . “From The Big Sleep to The Long Goodbye.” 1973. The Big Book o f Noir. Eds. Ed
Gorman, Lee Server, and Margin H. Greenberg. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.
Print.
— . “The Halfling.” 1943. Science Fiction o f the 4 0 ’s. Eds. Frederik Pohl, Martin Harry
Greenberg, and Joseph Olander. New York: Avon Books, 1978. 121-42. Print.
— . “I Feel Bad Killing You.” 1944. Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames. Eds. Robert E.
Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Bames &
Noble Books, 1993. 529-53. Print.
— . Introduction. 1976. The Sword Woman, by Robert E. Howard. New York: Zebra
Books, 1977. 5-11. Print.
— . “Leigh Brackett: Journeyman Plumber.” Interview with Steve Swires. Backstory 2:
Interviews with Screenwriters o f the 1940s and 1950s. Ed. Pat McGilligan.
Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1991. 15-26. Print.
— . No Good from a Corpse. 1944. No Good from a Corpse. Tucson, AZ: Dennis
McMillan Publications, 1999. 1-228. Print.
— . The Sword o f Rhiannon. 1953. Seattle, WA: Planet Stories, 2009. Print.
— . “The Science-Fiction Field.” Writer’s Digest 24:8 (1944): 20-27. Print.
— . “So Pale, So Cold, So Fair.” 1957. Eds. Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian. Hard-boiled:
An Anthology o f American Crime Stories. New York: Oxford University Press,
1995. 349-76. Print.
— . Stranger at Home. 1946. Rockville, MD: Disruptive Publishing / Black Mask, 2004.