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