Popular Culture Review Vol. 23, No. 1, Winter 2012 | Page 113

ERRATA The Crime Fiction of Leigh Brackett In P o p u la r C u ltu re R e v ie w Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2011, page 40A, last three paragraphs In the crime novels Brackett published in the 1950s, she dispensed with hard-boiled protagonists and built her stories around ordinary mid-century family men thrown into extraordinary—and extraordinarily violent— circumstances. In The Tiger Among Us, a man is beaten by teenage hoodlums and becomes obsessed with revenge, and with overcoming the fear and anger the attack has instilled in him. In An Eye for an Eye (also 1957), an attorney is compelled into the role of investigator when his wife is kidnapped by a psychopath. These later crime novels have fallen into obscurity, unlike No Good from a Corpse and several of Brackett’s other hard-boiled stories, which periodically find their way back into print. The greater interest in the earlier stories probably has partly to do with the enduring popularity of the hard-boiled style, although it is also the case that Brackett’s later novels are weighted by a kind of psychoanalytic exposition that has fallen out of popular favor. But these later novels nevertheless problematize a common understanding of Brackett as having dabbled in crime fiction without mastering the conventions that produce fully satisfying instances of the genre. The choices she made in her detective fiction, rather than revealing an incomplete control of the genre, appear within the context of her other work to have been quite deliberate. Her stories—western, crime, or sci-fi—do not allow the kind of comfortable hero-identification that has helped sustain the popularity of the hard-boiled writers that initially inspired her. In place of vicarious power and certainty, Brackett offers readers protagonists that, in spite of strength, cynicism, and cunning, are not immune to the conditions of helplessness, terror, and wonder. National University, San Diego Christine Photinos