Leigh Brackett

Leigh Douglass Brackett (December 7, 1915, Los Angeles, California to March 18, 1978, Lancaster, California) was an American novelist and screenwriter who worked at the highest level of both science fiction and Hollywood for four decades. In science fiction she was nicknamed the Queen of Space Opera and was one of the most prominent women writing during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. In film she co-wrote some of the most enduring screenplays of the American studio era. She was married to fellow science fiction novelist Edmond Hamilton from 1946 until his death in 1977.

Her science fiction began in the pulps in the early 1940s, with planetary romance and space opera set on a noir-tinged Mars and Venus. Her most enduring series follows Eric John Stark, a Conan-like outlaw raised by alien tribesmen on the cold side of Mercury, across novels including The Secret of Sinharat, People of the Talisman, and the later Skaith trilogy (The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, The Reavers of Skaith) collected as The Book of Skaith. Her post-apocalyptic novel The Long Tomorrow (1955) made her the first woman shortlisted for the Hugo Award. Her 1944 hard-boiled mystery No Good from a Corpse, written in the style of Chandler and Hammett, broke her into Hollywood.

Her film work began when director Howard Hawks read No Good from a Corpse and told his secretary to call in this guy Brackett to co-write The Big Sleep (1946) with William Faulkner, the adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel that became the Bogart and Bacall classic. She went on to write or co-write Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1966), and Rio Lobo (1970) for Hawks and John Wayne, then adapted Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1973) for Robert Altman. In 1978, shortly before her death from cancer, she completed a first-draft screenplay for what George Lucas had hired her to write: the script that, after Lawrence Kasdan's later passes, became Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

She also wrote the Newbery-honored young readers western Ride the Free Wind. She was a mentor and occasional collaborator to a young Ray Bradbury, who finished her novella Lorelei of the Red Mist when she left for Hollywood. The sheriff in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is named after her.

A note from Richard: The Skaith books (The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, and The Reavers of Skaith) are among the best science fiction and fantasy adventure novels I have ever read. I have read all three a dozen times, and they are my fallback whenever I need something to read while I am waiting somewhere. What sets Brackett apart for me is the depth of her world-building and the way she builds characters. The world of Skaith and the people who live on it always seem to come alive on the page.