Chandler's original was Santa Monica, now a lovely beach community near L.A., but at the time a notoriously corrupt burg. In an earlier tale, the overly gruesome and morbid 'I Feel Bad Killing You' (1944), she calls her crooked area the Surfside Division of L.A., an obvious homage to Raymond Chandler, who created 'Bay City' as the ultimate town run by crooked cops, in Farewell My Lovely (1940). This is basically similar to the plot subjects of her Howard Hawks movie westerns, Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1967). Two of the stories I have read, including the well done 'So Pale, So Cold, So Fair' (1957), deal with a man who cleans up a crooked town. Leigh Brackett was an occasional writer of detective fiction, in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler.

See for a detailed description of her career. Her crime writing career spanned 1944 to 1969 but she only produced five novels, ghost-writing one for the actor George Sanders (as did Craig Rice). In the same year, Planet Stories published one of Brackett's most influential short fiction works, the novella 'Lorelei of the Red Mist', a collaboration with Ray Bradbury, featuring Eric John Stark, Brackett's hallmark science fiction character. In 1946, Brackett married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton, and may well have had a positive influence on the quality of his own writing, given that the characters in his own Captain Future series became more complex after the marriage. The film, starring Humphrey Bogart and written by Leigh Brackett, William Faulkner, and Jules Furthman, is considered one of the best movies ever made in the genre.

Hollywood director Howard Hawks was so impressed by this novel that he had his secretary call in 'this guy Brackett' to help William Faulkner write the script for The Big Sleep (1946). Her first novel, 'No Good from a Corpse', published in 1944, was a hard-boiled mystery novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler. Her first published science fiction story was 'Martian Quest', which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Leigh Douglass Brackett was born in Los Angeles, California. The last was a departure for Brackett, since until then, all of her science fiction had been in the form of novels and short stories rather than screenplays. Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) was a writer of fantasy and science fiction, mystery novels and - best known to the general public - Hollywood screenplays, most notably The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) She received the Hugo award posthumously for this in 1981.

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