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Leigh Brackett

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Leigh Brackett (December 7, 1915 - March 18, 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).

Career overview

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.

While Brackett published mainly short fiction in the 1940s, she concentrated on longer works of fiction in the fifties and early sixties. By the mid-1950s, however, most of Brackett's writing was for the more lucrative film and television markets. She returned to science fiction in the seventies with the publication of The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974) and The Reavers of Skaith (1976), collected as The Book of Skaith in 1976, reworkings of her Eric John Stark stories, but set on Skaith rather than Mars.

Most of Brackett's science fiction is best characterized as either space opera or planetary romance, the latter mainly centering on a Martian venue influenced by Percival Lowell and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Brackett's Mars is a world of science fantasy, an arid, dying planet, populated by ancient, decadent and mostly humanoid races (see Mars in fiction). Their iron-age technology allows for plenty of swordplay and similar action, while the remnants of ancient super-technology and occasional psi powers play the part of magic. Brackett's seventies venue Skaith is less arid but otherwise similar.

Eric John Stark, Brackett's most memorable character, is sometimes compared to Robert E. Howard's Conan, but is in many respects closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan or Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli. Stark, an orphan from earth, is raised by the semi-sentient aboriginals of Mercury, who are later killed by earthmen. He is saved from the same fate by a terran official, who adopts Stark and becomes his mentor. When threatened, however, Eric John Stark frequently reverts to the primitive N'Chaka, the "man without a tribe" he was on Mercury. Thus, Stark is the archetypical modern man—a beast with a thin veneer of civilization.

Brackett's critically most acclaimed science fiction novels are The Sword of Rhiannon (1953) and The Long Tomorrow (1955). The former is most memorable for its vivid description of Mars before its oceans evaporated. The latter describes an agrarian, deeply technophobic society that develops after a nuclear war, and is singled out for praise because of its more obvious relevance to the present rather than its stylistic merits.

Brackett received the Hugo award posthumously for her work on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back in 1981. This script 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.

Brackett's contribution to the shooting script of Empire has been minimized by George Lucas; it is clear that her completed first draft of the screenplay was heavily revised, first by Lucas and then by Lawrence Kasdan. How much of Brackett's screenplay survived into the movie is unclear; Brackett's screenplay has never been published.

Bibliography

Novels

  • Shadow Over Mars (1951) - first published 1944; published in US as The Nemesis from Terra 1961
  • The Starmen (1952) - also published as The Galactic Breed 1955 (abridged), The Starmen of Llyrdis 1976
  • The Sword of Rhiannon (1953) - first published as Sea-Kings of Mars
  • The Big Jump (1955)
  • The Long Tomorrow (1955)
  • Alpha Centauri or Die! (1963) - combination of The Ark of Mars and Teleportress of Alpha C
  • Novels featuring Eric John Stark
    • Enchantress of Venus (1949) - first published as City of the Lost Ones
    • The Secret of Sinharat (1964) - expansion of Queen of the Martian Catacombs
    • People of the Talisman (1964) - expansion of Black Amazon of Mars
    • The Ginger Star (1974)
    • The Hounds of Skaith (1974)
    • The Reavers of Skaith (1976)

Collections

  • The Coming of the Terrans (1967)
    • Includes The Beast-Jewel of Mars, Mars Minus Bisha, The Last Days of Shandakor, Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon, and The Road to Sinharat.
  • The Halfling and Other Stories (1973)
    • Includes The Halfling, The Dancing Girl of Ganymede, The Citadel of Lost Ages, All the Colors of the Rainbow, The Shadows, Enchantress of Venus, and The Lake of the Gone Forever.
  • The Book of Skaith (1976) - omnibus edition of the three Skaith novels
  • The Best of Leigh Brackett (1977), ed. Edmond Hamilton
    • Includes The Jewel of Bas, The Vanishing Venusians, The Veil of Astellar, The Moon that Vanished, Enchantress of Venus, The Woman from Altair, The Last Days of Shandakor, Shannach — The Last, The Tweener, and The Queer Ones.
  • Martian Quest: The Early Brackett (2000)
    • Includes all of Brackett's early short stories published up to March 1943.
  • Stark and the Star Kings (2005), with Edmond Hamilton
  • Sea-Kings of Mars (2005) - Volume 46 in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks series

Short fiction

1940-1944

1945-1949

1950-1954

1955-1965

After 1965

  • Come Sing the Moons of Moravenn (The Other Side of Tomorrow, 1973)
  • How Bright the Stars (Flame Tree Planet: An Anthology of Religious Science-Fantasy, 1973)
  • Mommies and Daddies (Crisis, 1974)
  • Stark and the Star Kings (2005), with Edmond Hamilton (in the collection of the same name)

As editor

  • The Best of Planet Stories No. 1 (anthology; 1975)
  • The Best of Edmond Hamilton (collection; 1977)

Other genres

  • No Good from a Corpse (crime novel; 1944)
  • Stranger at Home (crime novel; 1946) - ghost-writer for the actor George Sanders
  • An Eye for and Eye (crime novel; 1957) - adapted for television as Markham (1959-60; CBS)
  • The Tiger Among Us (crime novel; 1957; UK 1960 as Fear No Evil), filmed as 13 West Street (1962; dir. Philip Leacock)
  • Follow the Free Wind (western novel; 1963) - received the Spur Award from Western Writers of America
  • Rio Bravo (western novel; 1959) - novelization based on the screenplay by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett
  • Silent Partner (crime novel; 1969)

Leigh (Douglass) Brackett (1915-1978)

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