Fantastic Metropolis

Most of Leigh’s characters definitely had complex skeletons in their closets. Sometimes you even found out a bit about them. Sometimes you didn’t. I think it depended how the story went, for she wrote with few notes, flying by the seat of her pants but usually bringing the ship in to some kind of reasonable landing. She had great instincts and she learned to trust them. Like Howard’s, Leigh’s characters didn’t vary much. Usually the central character was a star-weary spacer down on his luck, good-looking in a battered kind of way, something eating his heart or conscience he’d rather forget, a past he’s not proud of, ready to take the jobs and the women nobody else would or could handle. In her hands the form grew more sophisticated, but the Leigh Brackett of The Big Sleep was pretty much the same as the Leigh Brackett who wrote The Long Goodbye many years later (including one of my favourite lines from the villain, after bottling his girl-friend’s face, to Marlowe “Her, I love. You—I don’t even like.”). It was the same Brackett who wrote Martian Quest and her last story, a collaboration with Ed Hamilton, Stark and the Star Kings, which has yet to appear. Her characters were complex by suggestion only, yet they are almost always believable. Because what she could do was create an ambience. She might have raised a suspicious eyebrow at my French, but it produced a bloody good frisson, that ambience. And it was that atmosphere you inhaled as hard as you could, just as you would with Bradbury and Ballard. Who cared about the plot mechanics? Brackett’s atmosphere made you high and wanting more of it. You soon discovered indeed that Brackett was extremely addictive. You started searching the second hand bookstores for those old pulps containing unreprinted work (much now at last reprinted here). You developed a Stark habit. You didn’t care that you had a fair guess the hero would get neither the girl nor the gold but redeem his honour instead. Her plots improved in quality but most of the time remained variations on her favourite theme—the man with only his life to lose is offered a dangerous job he can’t refuse. It’s there in Martian Quest. In her most famous collaboration with Ray Bradbury, Lorelei of the Red Mist. She had almost a mother’s pride in Ray and was tickled when that story, which had appeared in the magazine with her byline as the most prominent, was reprinted in book form with Ray’s name in the largest type. She had a generous affection for Ray. She celebrated his success. I feel that I, too, in some ways, was one of Leigh’s boys. She had a way of making you feel very proud of yourself. She had a kind of integrity you don’t seem to run across as much as you did. And she had a strong sympathy for the underdog. Especially the one who makes it back from the bottom. She showed that sympathy in Rio Bravo. It was in her wonderful historical novel Follow The Free Wind and, of course, when Eric John Stark returned in The Ginger Star and its sequels, he was still, in her words, a wolf’s head, an outlaw.

Donald A. Wollheim, who was another great admirer and opposed to most of what she stood for politically, said she was the best possible combination of Burroughs and Merritt. He was proud to publish much of her early work in book form. She learned most of what she knew about structure after 1940 from Ed Hamilton, whom she married January 1st, 1947, with Ray Bradbury as their best man. Ed really helped her discipline her talent. He wrote complicated plot-outlines and detailed chapter by chapter plans, whereas she just sat down at the typewriter and started. She always said that she owed most of what she learned about structure to Ed, while he was always quick to say that her influence had improved his style.

She’d start with a mood, a bit of landscape, an image, a feeling. The plots of those early stories weren’t what caught you. It was that atmosphere, the glamour, the sense of romantic desolation which harks back to science fiction’s Gothic roots and which can be found, for instance, in Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe and the Brontes. Rapidly written, for the most part, these stories have the feel of raw visionary poetry. They appeared in what I believe were the superior pulps, containing more vivid and often more lasting fiction than the admired Astounding and F&SF, which were considered more prestigious in their day. I preferred the pictures in Fantastic, particularly when they were by Finlay. With Weird Tales and Campbell’s excellent Unknown, for me Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Science Fiction—all contained more idiosyncratic writing, more stylish innovation, than an entire run of the more respectable sf magazines. It’s where I first read Charles Harness, author of The Paradox Men, a romantic classic to rival Captain Blood, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber and many others. By the late 50s only Galaxy ran the best examples of that kind of fiction, serialising, for instance Bester’s Tiger! Tiger!, which for me is a truly American novel, reflecting the spirit of Tom Paine in a way I have never seen bettered. Bester also enjoyed Leigh’s stories.