But when I visited them, I was told that it was actually Leigh Brackett who wrote them under his guidance using the “pen name” Edmond Hamilton. He wrote the first story “The Return of Captain Future.” Then he wrote the synopses for the other stories. When Startling Stories asked Hamilton, in 1950, to revive Captain Future for a series of short stories, he was busy working on other assignments. He no longer wrote in a hurry and took an interest in carefully forming his sentences. Under the influence of his wife, he stopped using his typewriter as a machine gun. Even though he plotted his stories before he wrote them, he had nevertheless been a hack writer all the way from “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” published in Weird Tales, August 1926. Leigh Brackett learned plotting from her husband. Over the years the two affected each other’s writing. I just start writing the first page and let it grow.’ I exclaimed, ‘That is a devil of a way to write a story!’ But for her, it seemed to work fine.”

To my astonishment, when Leigh was working on a story and I asked her, ‘Where is your plot?’ she answered ‘There isn’t any. I was used to writing a synopsis of the plot first, and then working from that. In his introduction to The Best of Leigh Brackett (Ballantine, 1977) Hamilton wrote: “We found, when we first began working together, that we had quite different ways of doing a story. Hamilton met Leigh Brackett in 1940 and he was least to say impressed by stories like “The Jewel of Bas” and “The Veil of Astellar.” But while Hamilton knew what he was going to write when he sat down by his typewriter, Brackett had no idea whatsoever of the direction her stories would take when she sat down at hers. Similarly, Edmond Hamilton plotted and structured his stories before he wrote them. He was even more careful when he plotted and structured The Last Tycoon and spent the last years of his life on the draft that was unfinished when he died in 1940.

Scott Fitzgerald “tore off” short stories for the slick market, but at the same time he took his time when he wrote The Great Gatsby and other novels. It is said that Nobel laureate Pär Lagerkvist, who wrote Barabbas, could spend a week rewriting and polishing one single sentence. Marcel Proust stayed in bed year after year and wrote and wrote and never quite finished his Remembrance of Things Past. Much More Than the Queen of Space Opera! by Bertil Falk

The best of leigh brackett