Do You like book The Best Of Leigh Brackett (1986)?
While reading our author's first hardboiled mystery, film director Howard Hawks was so impressed with its toughness that he told an assistant, “Get me this guy Brackett!” not knowing that “Leigh” was really a woman. Thus began a twenty-five year association that lead to her writing five good sceenplays for him, three of which--”The Big Sleep,” “Rio Bravo,” and “Eldorado”--resulted in classic films.Although her work as a screenwriter was extraordinarily successful, it was also intermittent, and science fiction/ fantasy remained Brackett's main gig. The money wasn't as good as Hollywood, but the work was steady; besides, unlike the Tinseltown commissions, her fiction--what to write and when--remained in her complete control. What she primarily decided to write were "planetary romances": ostensibly science fiction, such works were really sword and sorcery tales, usually set on improbable versions of our neighboring planets. Brackett inherited the dying cities, dangerous villains, mighty warriors and beautiful women of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars, but she rejected his dualism and the moribund Victorian morality that came with it. Unlike Burroughs', her cities are not merely dying but decadent, her villains not simply evil but selfish and deluded, her harsh heroes—if they are noble—keep quiet about it, and her women not only speak up when they choose but know how to take care of themselves.This anthology, edited by her husband Edmund Hamilton, is an excellent introduction to Brackett. Her early story "The Jewel of Bas" (1944) is innovative and surprising, featuring non-traditional heroes, an android demiurge, and a plot so elemental it seems more like myth than fantasy. Like most of the other stories here, it is set on another planet, and I believe such planetary romances are Brackett's best work. Particularly noteworthy of these are "The Veil of Asteller," a nuanced variation on the vampire trope, "The Moon that Vanished," a vivid questing tale, the novella "The Enchantress of Venus," an effective adventure involving Brackett's flinty hero Eric John Stark, and the two powerful but very different imaginings of dying civilizations, "The Last Days of Shandakor" and "Shannach the Last." In addition to the these, the anthology also contains three tales of alien visits to Earth, notable for their complete lack of xenophobia--in spite of the fact that they were penned in the paranoid fifties.Brackett's fiction occupies an awkward position between science fiction and fantasy, and for that reason, is often neglected by readers who otherwise would delight in her work. Don't let yourself be--as I was until recently--one of those unlucky, oblivious ones.
—Bill Kerwin