'As to his dialogue, he was famous as the writer who had never had one line of dialogue actually spoken by an actor. It was, quite simply, unreadable, and it was all changed on the set — not by me, by Mr Hawks and Bogey, both of whom were pretty good at it.'
On arriving in Hollywood, Brackett had signed a seven-year contract, but it was cancelled after two-and-a-half years when the independent production company who had hired her was dissolved for tax purposes.
She moved to Republic Pictures, where she co-scripted the low budget 'B' movie The Vampire's Ghost (1945), starring John Abbott. Based on her original story, it was in fact a reinterpretation of John Polidori's 1819 tale 'The Vampyre', relocated to the west coast of Africa.
Following her script for the Columbia programmer Crime Doctor's Manhunt (1946), she was let go by the studio. 'I don't think it was a bad script,' she later recalled. But it was an off-beat story, and off-beat stories they did not want. So I had to go back to work, as it were.'
With Hollywood's movie industry shut down by a craft union strike in 1946, Brackett returned for a while to writing science fiction but, by the mid- 1950s onwards, she began to concentrate her efforts into writing for films and such television series as Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Rockford Files and Archer.
'The bad thing about film or TV work is that you have to wait for someone to ask you to do it,' cautioned Brackett, 'whereas you can sit down and write a novel when and as you wish; and if you have a reasonable degree of competence you can be fairly sure of selling it somewhere.'
She co-scripted the low budget Western Gold of the Seven Saints (1961), and worked uncredited on Man's Favorite Sport? (1964), Howard Hawks' remake of his own 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby.
More importantly, Brackett co-wrote another classic movie, the Western Rio Bravo (1959), for Hawks and his star John Wayne, and collaborated with them again on Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1967) and Rio Lobo (1970), which was Hawks' last film. In 1973 she adapted another Raymond Chandler novel, The Long Goodbye, starring a laconic Elliott Gould as a contemporary Philip Marlowe, for director Robert Altman.
In later years, Brackett and Hamilton divided their time between a renovated nineteenth century farmhouse in Ohio and their home in the California desert. Her final screen credit was for the first draft of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (198o), for which she won a posthumous Hugo Award. The film was dedicated to her memory.
In 1978, Brackett saw in the new year with Ray Bradbury and his wife at their home in Los Angeles. 'A wonderful time,' Bradbury remembered, 'but I sensed she was in her final year.
'A few months later she called me from a hospital in the high desert in grand laughing humour. The doctor, bless him, had injected a huge overdose of pain-killing drugs so that she could die joyfully. She did just that, the next day, before I could make it to the desert to give her a final embrace. Her laughter still sounds. My love remains.'
Leigh Brackett died of cancer on 18 March 1978, aged 62. She left behind her a legacy of stories that are as fresh and exciting today as they were when they were first published in the pulp magazines more than half-a-century ago.
'The tale of adventure — of great courage and daring, of battle against the forces of darkness and the unknown — has been with the human race since it first learned to talk,' explained the author. 'It began as part of the primitive survival technique, interwoven with magic and ritual, to explain and propitiate the vast forces of nature with which man could not cope in any other fashion. The tales grew into religions. They became myth and legend. They became the Mabinogion and the Ulster Cycle and the Voluspa. They became Arthur and Robin Hood, and Tarzan of the Apes.
'The so-called space opera is a folk-tale, a hero-tale, of our particular niche in history. If you want accurate up-to-date science, buy a book and be prepared to buy a new one every week or so as the state of knowledge continues to move ahead in quantum jumps. Furthermore, if you are looking for the delights of cannibalism, incest, outré sex, or a general feeling of dismal gloom, you will not find them here. These stories, shameful as it may seem, were written to be entertaining, to be exciting, to impart to the reader some of the pleasure we had in writing them.'
With her masterful stories of lost races and other worlds, there is no doubt that Leigh Brackett accomplished exactly what she set out to do as a writer. And for that, we fans of her romantic interplanetary adventures should be forever grateful.
Stephen Jones
London, England
October 2004
Table of Contents
SEA KINGS OF MARS
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Maps of Mars
Introduction
The Sorcerer of Rhiannon
The Jewel of Bas
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Terror Out of Space
I
II
III
IV
V
Lorelei of the Red Mist
The Moon That Vanished
1: Down to the Darkling Sea
2: The Emerald Sail
3: Over the Bar
4: "I Will Wait!"
5: Into the Moonfire
6: End of the Dream
7: To Walk Divine
Sea-Kings of Mars
1: The Door to Infinity
2: Alien World
3: City of the Past
4: Perilous Secret
5: Slave of Sark
6: On the Martian Sea
7: The Sword
8: The Thing in the Dark
9: Galley of Death
10: The Searings
11: Dread Accusation
12: The Cursed One
13: Catastrophe
14: Daring Deception
15: Under the Two Moons
16: Voice of the Serpent
17: Caer Dhu
18: The Wrath of Rhiannon
19: Judgement of the Quiru
20: The Return
Queen of the Martian Catacombs
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Enchantress of Venus
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
Black Amazon of Mars
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
The Last Days of Shandakor
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
The Tweener
The Road to Sinharat
I
II
III
IV
V
Afterword
Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories Page 70
