One of the stories near the end particularly struck me, "The Tweener" as it was very different from the rest being set on earth and more of a psychological horror. The novella "Lorelei of the Red Mist" that she co-wrote with Ray Bradbury wasn't that great but "The Sea Kings of Mars" felt like a cross between "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the lost Ark" and was great fun. Having said that, not all of the stories worked particularly well for me although the collection seemed to get better as it went on (the stories are in bibliographical order). Like Burroughs' John Carter or Carson Napier, she has her enigmatic heroes such as Eric John Stark but her characters are more well-rounded, warts'n'all. There is a progression with more complex and imaginative stories and characters. In some ways, Leigh Brackett carried on the tradition of swash-buckling adventures in space started by Edgar Rice Burroughs but it's not just more of the same.
Well, this was quite a hefty collection containing many stories and a couple of novellas, mostly set on Mars or Venus. Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963).īrackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio. In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.īrackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life.
Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Leigh Brackett was born on Decemin Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica.
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