No Good from a Corpse

About This Book

Published in 1944, No Good from a Corpse is the first novel by Leigh Brackett (1915–1978), who would become one of the most versatile writers in American genre fiction — celebrated for both hardboiled crime and planetary science fiction, and later as the screenwriter of The Big Sleep (with William Faulkner), Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye, and The Empire Strikes Back. The novel follows private detective Edmond Clive as he investigates the murder of his former girlfriend in a case that takes him through the dark side of wartime Los Angeles. Howard Hawks was so impressed by the novel that he hired Brackett to co-write the screenplay for The Big Sleep, assuming from the tough prose that the author was a man.

Excerpt

Edmond Clive saw her almost as soon as he came into the tunnel from the San Francisco train. She was standing beyond the gate, watching for him, and somehow in all that seething press of uniforms and eager women, she was quite alone.— Opening of No Good from a Corpse

What Critics Say

Brackett is one of the few authors who can write Chandleresque prose better than Chandler— David L. Vineyard, Mystery*File

Publication Details