I have a circle of favorite authors, and at any time I favor one over the other. The Holy Trinity is generally Robert Ervin Howard, Karl Edward Wagner, and Leigh Brackett.
Leigh wasn’t technically Sword & Sorcery, more concisely she wrote Sword & Planet, but her characters were iconic S&S figures. Tough, smart, elementally aware of the events around them as they unfolded. They took center stage and forced the story to revolve around their actions. The dialogue heavily echoed noir novels, tense and dangerous. But she combined the hard-boiled and savage science fiction into something unique.
She was born on December 7, 1915. She was writing science fiction and noir crime in the early 1940s before she came to the attention of Howard Hawks (based on her novel No Good From A Corpse) and he recruited her to to write the screenplay of The Big Sleep with William Faulkner, thinking she was a man initially.
She went on to write some more iconic screenplays, like Rio Bravo and the initial script for Empire Strikes Back. She occasionally returned to writing science fiction. Her Mars and Solar System tales from the 1950s all convey a profound sense of loss, that the frontiers are gone and commercialism and bureaucracy poison what remains.
Her final novels featured her earlier, most famous character Eric John Stark/N’Chaka, set appropriately on a world with a dying sun and the cultures either killing each other or themselves. This was the Book of Skaith, comprised of The Ginger Star, the Hounds of Skaith, and The Reavers Of Skaith. Reading those stories in my college years, I was struck by the tone of inevitable loss, even more that Lord of the Rings hit me.
A lot of her work is available for free online, for instance in a lot of the scans of the old pulp magazines in the Pulp Magazine Archive of archive.org. If you’ve never read anything by her, be prepared for some of the most simultaneously concise and expressive prose that you’ve ever read.
Thinking about her work, and what we have these days, it is difficult to avoid that same sense of loss that she conveyed so well. Not that the writers today are all or even mostly bad, but there ain’t nobody like Leigh Brackett.
Bret, without doubt SUDS is my favorite pulp commentary. I love DCGs and too began with 3 LBBs and Melee. Melee, a game I played to adulthood and then played with my 5 daughters! Now I can no longer allow Mrs Brackett’s Hounds of Skaith to languish on my to read pile! Thanks for another great post.
Hey, Morgan! Been a while!
I still remember meeting you and at least one of your daughters at GenCon 2006 – didn’t you end up with that castle that George was giving away?
Thanks for the very high praise, I am flattered. I’ll try to live up to it!
Make sure you read all 3 Skaith books in order, if possible, as they are really all one long novel. It’s been a decade since I read the Book of Skaith, so I am going to reread it over the holidays this year.
Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment! If there is any way I can improve, let me know!
Bret
Working my way through my first read through of the Skaith stories (just started Reavers) and I am really enjoying her writing style. I have beens long time fan of REH and have been working to expand into other S&S and S&P authors. Great write-up ad always Bret. Thank you.
Hey, Alfred,
Glad that you are enjoying her writing, and checking out the Book of Skaith.
If you are still up for a novel of hers after finishing Stark’s last adventure, I’d recommend Shadow Over Mars, or Nemesis From Terra as it was published in book form. It’s available from the Internet Archive in a few pulp magazines if you want to read it via pdf or kindle.
Thanks for stopping by and the kind words, I really appreciate it.
Bret