Today is December 7, and that means it’s the birthday of Leigh Brackett (1915-1978).

Just a heads-up, this isn’t going to be a typical birhtday post. It’s going to be a little freewheeling, and I’m going to vent my spleen a bit near the end.

Brackett is a major favorite around here. She started out in the pulps, writing what has become known as sword and planet with a hardboiled twist.

She also wrote hardboiled detective stories. One day I’m going to do a series of posts on her detective fiction. But today is not that day.

Howard Hawks supposedly read one of her novels and told his secretary or executive assisstant, “get me this guy Brackett.” He was shocked when a woman walked in.

This led to Brackett working on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, starring  Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.  Bogey and Bacall are on the sofa in  the photo on the left. Brackett is the woman to their left with her head down.

Brackett was in the middle of a novella, “Lorelei of the Red Mist”, one of her best stories. She couldn’t finish it and work on the script for The Big Sleep. Screenwriiting  was a full time  job that paid a much better rate than the pulps. So, she called her young friend Ray Bradbury and asked him to fiinish it for her.

It was published in Planet Stories. That’s the cover there on the right. It is one of Brackett’s most powerful stories. And it didn’t suffer from Bradbury’s assist. Brackett, as well as Henry Kuttner, was mentoring Bradbury in writing at the time.

Brackett went on to have a very successful writing career in Hollywood. She wrote the screenplay for Rio Bravo as well as several other John Wayne films. I’m going to assume that pretty much everyone reading this post knows she had completed the first draft of the screenplay The Empire Strikes Back before her death.  There’s a reason Empire is the strongest installment of the original trilogy.

Brackett was married to Edmond Hamilton, another favorite around here. Their marriage would make the topic of another post. Again, that’s for another day.

Brackett developed a solar system in which all the terrestrial planets had indigenous life, as well as some of the larger moons of the gas giants. It was a wild, exotic place, with savages on Mercury and Mars, and jungles on Venus.

Many of the settings and aliens in Brackett’s work are pretty standard tropes from the science fiction of that era. Hackneyed would be a good term to describe them if a writer tried to use them today. But in Brackett’s hands, those tropes were magic.

One thing about much of Brackett’s work is that it contains a sadness and an undercurrent of tragedy inherent in the settings and situation, especially her stories of Mars. See “The Last Days of Shandakar” as an example. Other examples include “The Dacing Girl of Ganymede” and the aforementioned “Lorelei of the Red Mist”.

Brackett’s work had a sense of adventure that I don’t see much today. I may simply be missing it. I’ve not had time to de a great deal of reading, especially since I got back into academia. Plus, I’ve been reading mostly mysteries and thrillers the past few years.

Which brings me to my spleen venting. I will tie this post back into Brackett before the end, I promise. I’ll stick in some Brackett covers to break up the text a little.

I’m not going to vent about Brackett, but about the lack of her and other writers. What I am addressing is traditional publishing, not indie publishing.

There’s been some discussion on X (formerly Twitter) over the last few weeks or months about why men and boys aren’t reading. The concensus among those who aren’t in the trad pub bubble know that really isn’t the case.

Men are reading. They jjust aren’t reading the pablum provided by New York.

I have mostly stayed out of these discussions.

Then today someone posted a link to an op-ed in The New York Times. I won’t provide a link because I didn’t read the article. I had to sign up for an account to access the article. Nope, not gonna do it.

The quote I saw nearly killed brain cells, it was so stupid. The author of the article said “I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead…Furthermore, young men should be readng Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante. Males readers don’t need to be parided with male writers.”

I’m not sure where to start witih that stupdity, but I’ll try.

First, men don’t rule the roost in traditional publishing. The industry is ninety-soemthing percent women. The exact number varies a bit depending on who is doing the counting, but it can’t be argued that traditional publishing isn’t controlled by women.

Second, who is the author of this piece of drivel to say women writers should be read instead of men? (I haven’t seen the name of the author.) I thought it was up to the reader to decide which writer to read.

I had never heard of Sally Rooney or Elena Ferrante. I looked them up on Aamzon so you don’t have to.

You’re welcome.

(Now I’m going to have to do searches for Lovecraft, Howard, and L’Amour to keep those women’s books and others like them from showing  up in my reccomendations.)

These are women writers who write about women. Their relationships with each other. Their relationships with each other’s  husbands. Their books sound like deep introspective nanvel gazing about real people living real ives in the real world.

No thanks, I want imaginary worlds. Action. Adventure. Women to be rescued, not strong grrll bosses.

I would almost bet money that their works will be forgotten in a few decades from now. Just like many best-sellers of the past have been.

If these are the attitudes and the product of New York publishing, it is no wonder trad pub is dying.

But I don’t believe men aren’t reading, although I think reading is definitely in decline among younger people. I had a university student a few days ago tell me he never read unless he had to.

Men are reading, they just aren’t reading what the wokescolds in New York are telling them to. Men are reading Howard and Lovecraft, Burroughs and Haggard, L’Amout and Chandler, Hammett and Spillane.

Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore. Kristine Kathyrn Rusch.

And we have indie. I’m not even going to attempt to name indie writers. There are too many of them, and I haven’t been able to keep up with them for the last few years. It is a golden age of exciting fiction.

Brackett wrote what men and women want to read.

A compelling story about men and women striving to survive in a dangerous world. And if Brackett’s heroes are a little worn and wounded and world-weary, so much the better.

People don’t read to be miserable.  They don’t read to be enlightened about the human condition or to have their consciousness raised. They certainly don’t read to be preached to and told their interests aren’t valid or that they’re what’s wrong with society.

And as for I should be reading a certain author that trad pub wants to push, I say I’ll read whatever I damn well please.

And that will certainly include Leigh Brackett.