Sorry about my false posting just now. Sometimes my pinkie
hits an extra beat. I just picked up a copy of MARTIAN Q UEST
by Leigh Brackett (Haffner Press 2002) which collects all the
early Brackett science fiction. The introduction by Michael
Moorcock had a passage of interest to this list.
I've often thought about the elements of hardboiled style
that Brackett uniquely combined with romantic science fiction
tradition. Separately, I've also remarked upon the hardboiled
aspects of cyberpunk fiction. In this passage Moorcock begins
discussing ERB's influence on Brackett and moves into our
area.
"Burroughs could sometimes rise to her (Brackett's) romantic
vision but his heroes were fundamentally country
(occasionally arboreal) gents, while Leigh's, wherever their
actual adventures took place, were fundamentally urban rough
diamonds. They tended to bring metropolitan experience and
values to the frontier. It was Ed Hamilton who described the
likes of The Continental Op not as detective stories but as
urban adventure stories, and Leigh approved of that
description. She took as much from the likes of James M.
Cain, who came from Maryland to use the sharp street language
of Southern California as his inspiration, as she took from
Burroughs. She antedated cyberpunk by some fifty years, by
bringing the spare, larconic prose and psychically wounded
heroes of Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler into the sf pulp,
rather as Max Brand (especially as Evan Evans) had brought it
to the Western."
The only part that gives me pause is his last point. I have
read (and enjoyed) a fair amount of Max Brand and much of it
predates Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler. I have not read as
much of his later stories which would include those published
under the Evan Evans name but I have trouble imagining Faust
changing styles as a result of reading Hammett and the like
and channeling that into stories published as by Evans. What
I have read of late Brand does not seem all that different
from the Brand of the late teens and early 1920s.
But leaving that aside, I thought this was an insightful
comment, especially in the urban nature of Brackett's
heroes.
Richard Moore
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