Review: No Good From a Corpse, by Leigh Brackett

Review: No Good From a Corpse, by Leigh Brackett

by Rich Horton

The great Science Fiction writer Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) was also a first-rate writer of crime novels, and Westerns. She wrote screenplays in all three genres, her credits including The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and The Empire Strikes Back. I have long been a great fan of her SF, but though I've seen some of her movies, until just now I hadn't read any of her crime novels.

No Good From a Corpse, from Coward McCann in 1944, was her first novel in any genre. It's pure hard-boiled noir, as cynical yet romantic as can be imagined. The story goes that Howard Hawks wanted her to write The Big Sleep (collaborating with William Faulkner!) after reading this novel, and that he was shocked when she showed up and wasn't a man. My copy is a 1999 Simon and Schuster trade paperback reprint, part of their Blue Murder series (edited by Maxim Jakubowski.)

Edmond Clive is the hero, a private detective, just returning from San Francisco, where he got some notoriety for solving a case. As soon as he arrives he meets Laurel Dane, a beautiful nightclub singer with whom he'd had a relationship of some sort. She seems desperate to see him, though it seems their relationship, whatever it may have been, is on rocky ground. Soon he realizes that Ken Farrar, another PI who Ed doesn't much like, has been pursuing her, and she's rebuffed him. At the same time, his childhood friend Mike Hammond, who had stolen his girlfriend long ago, also wants his help -- it seems he's finally gone straight, and married a rich woman, Jane Alcott, but that marriage has been threatened by some blackmail letters detailing his past, and also by his staying over at Laurel Dane's place. 

The pace is relentless. Before we even really know what's going on, Laurel Dane has been murdered, with Mike Hammond and Ed Clive in her apartment. Clearly they are the prime suspects, but Ed knows he didn't do it, and he becomes convinced that Mike didn't either. The rest of the book follows his somewhat flailing investigations, and a few more murders. He has to navigate a tangled web involving his own past, and that of Mike Hammond, and Laurel Dane's past, including her husband and a friend he made in prison; along with Jane Hammond's unstable siblings, Richard and Vivien Alcott. Ed takes an enormous amount of physical abuse. He battles with his frenemy detective, Gaines; and his investigations involve the usual mix of low-lifes and whores and drunks. The ending is satisfyingly twisty and cynical, and Ed Clive's philosophy of life is summarized with his favorite quote: "Of all things, never to have been born is best."

There are a couple of missteps -- Ed has a sidekick of sorts, Jonathan Ladd Jones, who seems a complete waste of time. Some of Ed's relationships with women come off strange -- supposedly he and Lauren never slept together, for example. Brackett's style is high noir, very well maintained, with a couple of passages that match the pure lyricism of the best sequences of her Martian stories. I don't think it's quite a great novel -- it's Chandleresque, sure, but it's not a match for Chandler at his best. Still and all, a novel well worth reading.