No Good From a Corpse

By Leigh Brackett

1943

First Published

3.69

Average Rating

215

Number of Pages

6H33M

Audio Length

Legendary SciFi writer Leigh Brackett (who won a posthumous award for the screenplay to Empire Strikes Back), began her career as a writer trying to reach the pages of Black Mask. She was never successful in this, but her Chandler-influenced novel No Good From a Corpse was so impressive in its hard-boiled dialogue that Howard Hawks insisted its author, unseen, be brought in to work on the screenplay adaption of The Big Sleep (together with a fella by the name of Faulkner.) Though Hawks was stunned to discover that Leigh was a woman, she got the job, and worked on what was probably the best film adaptation of a Chandler novel. No Good From a Corpse offers hard-boiled private eye Ed Clive, who gets involved with a dead girl, and suspects every one of her boyfriends—an ex-husband, a playboy, a blackmailer and a brute. There's a woman suspect as well, and a long chase through Sunset Strip.

Avg Rating

3.69

Number of Ratings

157

5 STARS

17%

4 STARS

46%

3 STARS

28%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Leigh Brackett

Author · 45 books

Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury. In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Brackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963). Brackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio. Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her.