No Good from a Corpse

This is a well-plotted, hard-boiled, page turner of a detective novel - exactly what one would expect from science fiction great Leigh Brackett. (I only just discovered she had also written in this genre!) Unfortunately, the production values of "Blackmask Online" - the publisher - are atrocious. The book was obviously scanned and OCRed, and not very carefully proofed, afterward. Creative interpretation is required to correct or make sense of word choice. "Clive" (the protagonist's name) is often turned into "dive", "time" often becomes "tune", "in" for some reason sometimes turns into "hi". Once you figure out what is going on, you can make sense out of most sentences (a few defy interpretation), but it is distracting and annoying. The pages are also formatted badly, with a hair's breadth of space between the top edge and the header text, no space between chapter headings and the following paragraph, other idiosyncrasies. It just looks ugly and amateurish. The overall impression is that this is a publisher who aims at turning a quick buck on a book in the public domain (there is no copyright information given), but who doesn't care much about doing a good job. I'm glad that they're making the work available - but having spent another person-day on editing wouldn't have killed them, either.

This collection includes all Brackett's 'criminous musings' as the compiler puts it. One novel, and eight short stories of the hardboiled detective flavour. I have seen comparisons of Brackett to Chandler, and although her output here is numerically lesser, it is certainly as good in content, and as far as short stories go, probably better. This is an outstanding collection at 3.83 No Good From A Corpse : No Good from a Corpse - Leigh Brackett No Good From A Corpse : Murder Is Bigamy - Leigh Brackett No Good From A Corpse : Red-Headed Poison [The Case of the Wandering Red-Head] - Leigh Brackett No Good From A Corpse : Murder in the Family - Leigh Brackett No Good From A Corpse : Design for Dying - Leigh Brackett No Good From A Corpse : I Feel Bad Killing You - Leigh Brackett No Good From A Corpse : No Star Is Lost - Leigh Brackett No Good From A Corpse : So Pale So Cold So Fair - Leigh Brackett No Good From A Corpse : The Misfortune Teller [The Death Dealer] - Leigh Brackett I had read elsewhere that this was rather Chandlerian, and it seems that is certainly the case. The private investigator in this novel is out to help people, even if he doesn't particularly like them, and even after getting shot, bashed, abused, lied to, and more. He has made friends (and feels a lot more than that) about a nightclub singer who has an inability to engage in any sort of monogamy, serial, or parallel. He realises that she has a rather dodgy past, and when he gets a whispered phone threat, things turn bad. This leads to an investigation where he is a murder suspect, as well as trying to clear the name of another man and childhood friend whose innocence he is sure of. Apart from these two gentleman, it appears that almost anyone else that appears could have been involved. A non-obvious, well done mystery follows, with all sorts of characters, and a witness and lead list that keeps getting terminally shortened. Quite well done. 4 out of 5 Bradbury double dealing death dog deception discovery. 3.5 out of 5 Hard-man's Sheila starveout shooting. 4 out of 5 Blackmail go round sabretooth sister skewer. 4 out of 5 Smart man frame-up rough stuff setup showdown. 3.5 out of 5 "Hank said that Surfside was a dirty town, dirty from the gutters up. He said any man with the brains of a sick flea would know that most of the liquor places were run illegally, and most of the hotels, too, and that two-thirds of the police force was paid to have bad eyesight." 4 out of 5 Champ takes one for the Kid. 3.5 out of 5 A local crimelord has a problem when the body of a reporter enemy's old lover is dumped on the newsman's doorstep. 4 out of 5 You didn't actually have to kill her, babe. 4 out of 5

I began this review months ago, I really did, just after I began reading this compilation. It stirred me so much that I could barely wait for the next page. You see, hard-boiled detective fiction is to me as good as it gets. Not from johnny-come-lately postmodernists typing on laptop computers from houseboats, but the true-blue mean-street 40's dime detective stuff of Hammett and Chandler and Woolrich. But especially Chandler.I had known of Leigh Brackett from her science fiction contributions, knew she could crack wise with the best of them from her movie scripts such as Rio Lobo (and of course, The Big Sleep). But I had never read any of her noir writing. Desperate for some California crime gothic, I bought this book.I will say Brackett is the only person I know of to have sections of dialogue as good as Raymond Chandler without slavishly imitating him. I had a smile on my face all the way through the title story. But remember how I said I began this review months ago? It has taken me this long to get through the short stories which follow. Far from being bad, yet not approaching classic status either, they suffer mostly from lacking a single, distinctive voice. Hammett's Continental Op was an untouchable man speaking in clipped phrases. Chandler had Marlowe and his romantic cynicism as a unifying presence in his canon. The title story of this book had a Marlowe-like character. But the others in No Good From a Corpse are all over the map.Brackett lacks the pure descriptive power of Chandler; in the last story Brackett spoke of the protagonist's "hard green eyes" what seemed like twenty times. There are also none of the quiet moments when we learn how Marlowe feels, some of his fallen-star philosophy, which are why Chandler's books are novels and these are pulp stories. In place of true feeling are scenes where characters who know one another very well each go on at length about various possibilities, then beat each other senseless. The fights are well done, but it seems a little like Brackett's trying too hard to be too hard-boiled.With Chandler we could kind of tell who was lying because they clammed. In Brackett stories, the guilty are as likely to offer postulates as the cops. In fact, they likely have a frame-up or two plotted in case their first alibi doesn't take.When she does try to actually imitate Chandler's style, it doesn't work. Here's an example: Chandler might say a gunsel's shoulder's were "a little narrower than City Hall." Brackett says in this book: "a little narrower- but not quite- than City Hall." It's as if she did not trust her readers to grasp the hyperbole; and when you think about it, hers is the more hyperbolic statement anyway.What else? Brackett's heroes get beat up. A lot. They seem never to be in control of a situation in the way Marlowe or Spade or the Continental Op or even Hammer were.These stories also rely on coincidence and happenstance to the point of flabbergasting a reader. Cars crash when they are needed

Leigh Brackett is best known for her contributions to the science fiction genre, but she was also an accomplished writer of mysteries, most of which are anthologized here for the first time. The dustjack that wraps this book is itself a piece of art; the book is solid, well-crafted and beautifully illustrated. Brackett hits her stride early with the first entry that provides the title to this book. Tight writing, excellent dialogue. All-around well-done product!