Re: RARA-AVIS: Leigh Brackett

michael david sharp (msharp@umich.edu)
Sat, 13 Jun 1998 10:16:25 -0400 (EDT) Yes, Etienne, everything you say is true. I own *Stranger at Home*, and
the dedication reads "To Leigh Brackett, whom I have never met" (!). She
is the greatest genre fiction writer of the century, IMO -- that is, she
was able to write Quite Well in the crime/mystery, scifi, and western
genres (she wrote ONE western -- it won the Golden Spur award for Best
Western of the year). Plus, of course, she wrote screenplays, and her
writing was admired by the most famous tough guy actors of all time:
Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne. Bogart had problems w/ the script for *The
Big Sleep* (an infamously co-written script: Brackett+Faulkner!), and he
presumed that the weaker parts were written by the woman -- turns out
everything he *liked* about the script, esp. the tough dialogue, was
Brackett's. Altman's *Long Goodbye* is IMO the best adaptation of
Chandler's work ever made. I could go on. I'm studying her career in
earnest for (I hope) an eventual book-length study of some sort. Of course
I *should* be finishing my dissertation...

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Michael D. Sharp Email: msharp@umich.edu
Department of English Lang. and Lit. Phone: (313) 761-8776
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Fax: (313) 763-3128

On Sat, 13 Jun 1998, Etienne Borgers wrote:

> At 12:20 AM 13-06-98 -0700, Ed Duggan wrote:
> >On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, michael david sharp <msharp@umich.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> On another subj., does anyone know where I can find a list of Leigh
> >> Brackett's crime stories?
> >
> >I had a look in a few things here, but no luck (brief section on LB in
> >Haut's _Pulp Culture_ mentions two novels, _Tiger Among Us_ and _No Good
> >from a Corpse_).
>
> I found the following to complete the list:
> An Eye for an Eye (1957)
> Silent partner (1969)
>
> A curiosity: she was the "ghost" for George Sanders (the actor) and wrote
> his novel 'Stanger at Home' (1946)
>
> She was more involved with science-fiction novels and short stories.
> However she will remain as one of the most important writers for film Noir
> by her collaboration with Howard Hawks for the script of "The big sleep".
> There are also three westerns she wrote for Hawks that in my opinion have
> all the carachteristics of HB novels [...the hats are different :)].
> To add to this palmares, her brilliant adaptation of The Long Goodbye for
> Robert Altman- a great film as well!
>
> Leigh Brackett was, IMHO, one of the very rare female writers who
> understood the HB/Noir genre and who was able to add high quality works to it.
>
> Could some of the followers inform me about possible biographies of this
> author, for so far such books are existing.
>
> E.Borgers
>
> http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6384
>
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