Tags
1940s, 1944, crime, detective, hardboiled, Leigh Brackett, noir
Something came out of the shadows behind him and connected with his skull just back of the right ear. There was a tremendous explosion without any noise to it. He fell a long way, into a place that was black and cold and utterly quiet. He had a dream while he was down there. Someone was slapping his face, sharply but without passion.
As legend goes, Howard Hawks was so impressed by No Good From a Corpse that he asked for “this guy Brackett” to help William Faulkner write the screenplay for Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946). Hawks didn’t seem to mind that Leigh Brackett was a woman, or that most of her fiction published to-date had been space opera and planetary adventure printed in magazines like Planet Stories. In fact, Brackett became one of his go-to writers, in a screenwriting career that included eleven films (if you include the first pass of The Empire Strikes Back, a few months before she died from cancer). Long-time readers will recognize her as one of my favorite science fiction authors, as I’ve reviewed a number of her stories and novels. But despite the noir tone in her SF, and my love of noir, I have yet to read any of her few mysteries—No Good From a Corpse, Stranger at Home ghostwritten for George Sanders, Silent Partner, and the suspense novels An Eye for an Eye and The Tiger Among Us. Given its legendary reputation, and several recent glowing reviews, I find it hard not to pick up No Good From a Corpse.
Detective Ed Clive returns home from one job, only to be thrust into the middle of another. One of his childhood friends turned worst enemies, Mick Hammond, is having marital troubles, as Mick and his heiress wife Jane have received threatening letters. To make things worse, Laurel Dane is somehow involved—a nightclub singer who’s in love with Ed, and visa-versa, even though they know they’re rotten for each other. When Laurel winds up dead, Ed and Mick are the two prime suspects—while Mick is the one who ends up in the clink, Ed remains under the microscope, the police expecting he had a role to play in the murder. To clear his name, and in search of vengeance, he sets out to find Laurel’s killer. On his journey down dark alleys and across L.A’s oil-specked beaches, he’ll run into Jane Hammond’s femme fatale sister, uncover the dark truths of Laurel’s past, and take a helluva beating in the process.
It’s very easy to see why Hawks was so impressed by Brackett’s writing, and why he wanted her to help script a Raymond Chandler novel—Brackett is one of the few authors who can write Chandleresque prose better than Chandler. Perhaps not for the entire length of the novel, but long enough to make it count. The dialogue is some of the sharpest and toughest writing I’ve read all year, with a deft vocabulary and rapier wit. The plotting is as convoluted as Chandler at his best, a crisscrossing maze of turncoats and double-blinds and unexpected murders. The first three chapters exist as a whirl, a kind of organized chaos that isn’t fully explained or comprehensible until the following chapter. Brackett would often nail the noir mood in her science fiction, and such is the case here, melding the super-tough Ed Clive with some fine pulp poetry:
That’s the hell of this case. Nobody has a face. Nobody even has a voice. Just shadows and whispers and keys turning, and death in somebody’s heart, and no way to get any of it out into the daylight.
That doesn’t even get into one-off gems like “The rain on the metal top sounded like a regiment of small boys bouncing golf balls.” And its twist-laden plot has a slew of unexpected surprises waiting to sneak up on you, several of them sucker-punches that I didn’t see coming. (Speaking of sucker-punches, the finale is a hum-dinger—it’s a shocking, brutal end to the story, both fitting and entirely unexpected.) I’d also like to mention the novel’s excellent sense of atmosphere… not just noir atmosphere, the miasma of smog and cordite and cigarettes. Brackett’s inclusion of everyday wartime elements—crowds include masses of uniformed men, there’s mention of “dimout” conditions—distinctly date the novel’s place in history.
The novel does slip a few times, though. The pace is so unrelenting and moves with such mercurial dexterity that the plot becomes dizzying; I had a hard time keeping up with the first few chapters before some of the character relationships and motivations had developed to the point where I had some form of grounding. The plot moves fast, and Brackett doesn’t slow down and keep the reader up to speed—just keep running to catch up with it, you’ll pick most it up by context. There’s also some overdone attempts at humor. While these start out more as screwball comedy, fitting the era if not the tone, a few of the scenes descended to cartoon hijinks—such as the scene with Clive, his alcoholic junior detective Johnathan Ladd Jones, and a pair of hookers that takes place in a room apparently made of empty gin bottles. Thankfully, there are few of such scenes, and while they did break the immersion they did not spoil the novel overall.
No Good From a Corpse is an excellent novel, and in another world would have gone down as a noir classic… had Brackett not switched focus to her screenplays, perhaps, or if her entire bibliography had been mysteries and not space opera. Instead, it’s a fascinating look at what might have been, had Brackett’s career revolved around writing Chandleresque adventure on Earth and not on Mars. I could come up with some more superlatives to describe it, but I won’t bother; suffice to say that the novel lives up to its reputation, and aside from a few minor flaws it will more than entertain any reader who enjoys a good dose of noir. I highly recommend it to the hardboiled reader, and want to point out that you can download an e-book version free at Munsey’s.
fromcouchtomoon said:
Not sci-fi, but tempting. Very, very tempting.
And I’m pleased to know that ‘Brackett did it better’ even in the mystery world. She is such a cool genre figure.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
Well it is free, so at worst I’m tempting you with the kind of ebook deal that a wallet approves of. Ain’t no domain like the public domain.
“Brackett did it better” is pure truth, when she put her mind to it she could out-write a good many authors. Shame that most of her stories were for the pulps, but at least I enjoy those. Apparently she even wrote one (1) western and it won a Spur Award (the more you know), so when I really need a break from my usual fare I can track that down…
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fromcouchtomoon said:
“Ain’t no domain like the public domain.” Lol. If I ever need a quick PSA jingle, I know who to contact.
And I definitely feel more more secure in my trivia base knowing that there is a such thing as a “Spur Award.”
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Thomas Anderson said:
We both read Leigh Brackett this week! Neat!
You’ve definitely made me want to read some of Brackett’s non-sf works now. I’ve liked some of her science fiction, but from your review I think she had a bit more personality shine through in the noir. At least in this one.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
Haha, nice timing!
Shame you didn’t like Ginger Star but I can understand why… I liked it when I first read it, but in hindsight it’s neither the strongest in the trilogy nor her best story… You have to really enjoy sword-and-planet—which is probably SF’s most formulaic subgenre—to gain something from it.
Sword of Rhiannon was probably her best SF adventure, and The Long Tomorrow, while flawed, is on a whole ‘nother plane—it’s a genuine masterwork. Flawed, neglected, overlooked, but still a masterwork. And Megan (^^ Couch) liked it even more than I did.
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Cavershamragu said:
Really enjoyed the review Chris – I enjoyed this one a lot, though the debt to Chandler, as you say, is clear. I think she did even better with her later Noir book, TIGER AMONG US. I have not read (yet) the book she ghosted for George Sanders which is said to be very good.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
Thanks Sergio! Your great review of Tiger Among Us sold me, but three years later I’m still trying to find a copy… I’m very tempted to read the Sanders ghostwrite (and the one ghostwritten by Craig Rice), since they sound very appealing and as new releases it’ll be easier to acquire them.
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Cavershamragu said:
I had no idea TIGER was so hard to find – it’s tru I bought mine a couple fo decades ago though …
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