Customer Reviews

No Good from a Corpse

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Leigh Brackett is best known for her contributions to the science fiction genre, but she was also an accomplished writer of mysteries, most of which are anthologized here for the first time. The dustjack that wraps this book is itself a piece of art; the book is solid, well-crafted and beautifully illustrated. Brackett hits her stride early with the first entry that provides the title to this book. Tight writing, excellent dialogue. All-around well-done product!

I began this review months ago, I really did, just after I began reading this compilation. It stirred me so much that I could barely wait for the next page. You see, hard-boiled detective fiction is to me as good as it gets. Not from johnny-come-lately postmodernists typing on laptop computers from houseboats, but the true-blue mean-street 40's dime detective stuff of Hammett and Chandler and Woolrich. But especially Chandler.
I had known of Leigh Brackett from her science fiction contributions, knew she could crack wise with the best of them from her movie scripts such as Rio Lobo (and of course, The Big Sleep). But I had never read any of her noir writing. Desperate for some California crime gothic, I bought this book.
I will say Brackett is the only person I know of to have sections of dialogue as good as Raymond Chandler without slavishly imitating him. I had a smile on my face all the way through the title story. But remember how I said I began this review months ago? It has taken me this long to get through the short stories which follow.
Far from being bad, yet not approaching classic status either, they suffer mostly from lacking a single, distinctive voice. Hammett's Continental Op was an untouchable man speaking in clipped phrases. Chandler had Marlowe and his romantic cynicism as a unifying presence in his canon. The title story of this book had a Marlowe-like character. But the others in No Good From a Corpse are all over the map.
Brackett lacks the pure descriptive power of Chandler; in the last story Brackett spoke of the protagonist's "hard green eyes" what seemed like twenty times. There are also none of the quiet moments when we learn how Marlowe feels, some of his fallen-star philosophy, which are why Chandler's books are novels and these are pulp stories. In place of true feeling are scenes where characters who know one another very well each go on at length about various possibilities, then beat each other senseless. The fights are well done, but it seems a little like Brackett's trying too hard to be too hard-boiled.
With Chandler we could kind of tell who was lying because they clammed. In Brackett stories, the guilty are as likely to offer postulates as the cops. In fact, they likely have a frame-up or two plotted in case their first alibi doesn't take.
When she does try to actually imitate Chandler's style, it doesn't work. Here's an example: Chandler might say a gunsel's shoulder's were "a little narrower than City Hall." Brackett says in this book: "a little narrower- but not quite- than City Hall." It's as if she did not trust her readers to grasp the hyperbole; and when you think about it, hers is the more hyperbolic statement anyway.
What else? Brackett's heroes get beat up. A lot. They seem never to be in control of a situation in the way Marlowe or Spade or the Continental Op or even Hammer were.
These stories also rely on coincidence and happenstance to the point of flabbergasting a reader. Cars crash when they are needed to crash; people fall when they are needed to fall, that sort of thing.
Still, who cares? These are minor quibbles, and I list them only to show why this is deserving of four stars instead of five. This is the genuine article, 40's noir, hard-bitten as it gets, with great titles from a bygone era, like "The Misfortune Teller." Oh, happy happy. If you are a fan I would recommend snapping this up, because who knows how long it will be before these stories see print again?

The novel which sent Leigh Brackett to Hollywood. Written in fluent hardboiled, it's easy to see why Howard Hawks picked her for "The Big Sleep", and it's not difficult to imagine the book as a good vehicle for Warner Brothers' company of rogues, with Bogart a plausible lead. There are the usual components of this sort of novel: a not quite hopelessly complicated plot, femmes fatales, hostile cops, tough dialogue, and a number of sound thrashings for the hero (The Leaving the Hospital Before He's Recovered Scene: "Listen, Mr. Clive. You've taken a bad beating--" "All right. It's my beating, isn't it? I can do what I want with it."). Brackett does not try hard for atmosphere or characterization, or even dazzling repartee, but she does furnish a breathless pace and plenty of action, all delivered with an effortless panache for which modern noirists strive in vain.

The Blackmask edition (which does NOT contain the supplementary short stories mentioned in other amazon reviews) is afflicted with the numberless typos you'd expect from a cheap print-on-demand source, but one can usually figure out what Brackett actually wrote.

This is a well-plotted, hard-boiled, page turner of a detective novel - exactly what one would expect from science fiction great Leigh Brackett. (I only just discovered she had also written in this genre!)

Unfortunately, the production values of "Blackmask Online" - the publisher - are atrocious. The book was obviously scanned and OCRed, and not very carefully proofed, afterward. Creative interpretation is required to correct or make sense of word choice. "Clive" (the protagonist's name) is often turned into "dive", "time" often becomes "tune", "in" for some reason sometimes turns into "hi". Once you figure out what is going on, you can make sense out of most sentences (a few defy interpretation), but it is distracting and annoying. The pages are also formatted badly, with a hair's breadth of space between the top edge and the header text, no space between chapter headings and the following paragraph, other idiosyncrasies. It just looks ugly and amateurish. The overall impression is that this is a publisher who aims at turning a quick buck on a book in the public domain (there is no copyright information given), but who doesn't care much about doing a good job. I'm glad that they're making the work available - but having spent another person-day on editing wouldn't have killed them, either.

In this, her first novel, Leigh Brackett captures brilliantly the spirit of the noir fiction popular from the 1920s to the 1940s. Of course as with any first novel, this book has a few flaws, but we can overlook that because the overall story is engrossing and mesmerizing. Even this early in her career, Brackett had a fine grasp of her writing and definitely knew how to tell a story even if the plot in places could be a bit weak. Few writers can match her pulsepounding prose or her noteworthy attempts to bring her characters above the pulp archetypes they embody. Although Brackett would go on mostly to write science fiction and fantasy, she nonetheless continued to produce mysteries of even higher quality than this later in her life. Those lucky enough to read and enjoy her writing should definitely seek them out if they have not already done so.

This is a marvelous piece of detective fiction that gives the reader a real hard-boiled hero and worthy bad guys and girls, but the edition on sale currently is so riddled with typos from start to finish that the publisher should pull it and reprint with the text corrected.