Leigh Brackett and A. Merritt

Yesterday marked the one hundred and fourth anniversary of Leigh Brackett’s nativity. All hail the Queen of Space Opera!

Cool illo from a Russian publication of The Sword of Rhiannon. It could very easily be used as the cover for an edition of Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar.

It has been noted over and over and over that Brackett was a lifelong fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs. That’s cool. I can say the same about my ownself. Proud of it. However, we know that Leigh was also a fan of one A. Merritt, an author who loomed just as large over the SFF scene of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s of Brackett’s youth as ERB. In fact, it can definitely be argued that Merritt was the stronger horse in that scene during the ‘30s and ‘40s when Leigh was finding herself as a writer.

In the past, I’ve likened ERB’s influence upon Brackett as being akin to that of Eric Clapton upon a young Eddie Van Halen. There is no doubt that Clapton was foundational in getting Eddie to play guitar, but there were also Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Allan Holdsworth exerting their influence in between Eddie buying Wheels of Fire and his recording of Van Halen I a decade later. I would say that Eddie’s sound and style in Van Halen was much more a combination of Beck, Page and Holdsworth than it was pure Clapton.

The same goes for Brackett and ERB. He sent her mind whirling through desiccated Martian sea-beds with twin moons speeding overhead when she was a young girl, but the wells of inspiration she drew upon to write her own tales owed as much or more to Merritt, C.L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and Raymond Chandler—Moore and REH were also both Merritt fans, by the way. What I aim to do in this blog entry is trace the influence of Merritt upon Brackett chronologically, beginning with the earliest Merrittesque Brackett story I know of and going from there. Since I haven’t—unfortunately—read all of Leigh’s early works, I may be missing some tales that are blatantly Merrittesque. That’s fine, because plenty of the tales I have read demonstrate a clear Merritt influence. Even if we didn’t know that Leigh was a Merritt fan, it wouldn’t be hard to guess from some of her stories.

“Lord of the Earthquake” from 1941, written barely a year into Brackett’s career as a pro writer, is Merrittesque to the bone. A damaged—but dangerous—man travels back in time to Mu, where he faces a mad tyrant not that much different from the King of Emakhtila in The Ship of Ishtar. For those out there who think that Brackett invented “damaged heroes” in an SFF context, you obviously haven’t read Merritt’s tales of John Kenton or James Kirkham. “Lord of the Earthquake” can be easily found in the excellent anthology, Heroes of Atlantis & Lemuria.

Moving ahead a couple of years, Brackett stories such as “The Jewel of Bas”, “The Veil of Astellar”, and “Lorelei of the Red Mist” all strike me as Merrittesque; especially “The Veil of Astellar”. That tale involves a man who has been touched by—and enslaved to—an Otherworldly power. The conflict between his enthrallment to Otherness and his ties to basic humanity reminds me strongly of Merritt’s The Moon Pool, which was basically the very first novel to ever deal in-depth with such concepts. Brackett’s “The Moon That Vanished” from 1948, once again, touches upon such themes. Neither ERB nor REH ever really explored those concepts. Lovecraft and Moore did, but they did so after the publication of The Moon Pool and were both admitted Merritt fans.

Now we come to the piece de resistance. Leigh’s The Sword of Rhiannon—which I reviewed for The Cimmerian before I had read any Merritt beyond The Ship of Ishtar—is rightly regarded as one of her best works. Let’s just put it plainly here: The Sword of Rhiannon can be accurately described as being cobbled together from fairly equal parts of Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar, The Face in the Abyss and Dwellers in the Mirage. The only really “new” element that Brackett introduced is the “Young Mars” setting, which Burroughs implied numerous times in his Barsoom novels. We have the “damaged hero” from The Ship of Ishtar and Seven Footprints to Satan. We have the “ship divided/feisty woman”— and a galley-slave revolt—from The Ship of Ishtar. We have the “Resistance”, alliances with non-humans and ancient serpent-folk from The Face in the Abyss. Most importantly, we have the “Man With Two Souls” concept which Merritt used so effectively in Dwellers in the Mirage. That is what drives the entire narrative and produces so much tension in The Sword of Rhiannon. Oh, and if somebody wants to argue that “Merritt couldn’t do hard-boiled prose”, they should take a gander at Merritt’s style in Seven Footprints to Satan and Burn, Witch, Burn. Perhaps not quite “hard-boiled”, but close enough for government work. Definitely not “florid”.

Jeffrey Jones’ cosmic cover for the 1967 Ace edition of The Big Jump.

In 1953, Leigh sold The Big Jump to Space Stories, with Don Wollheim publishing it not long after as an Ace Double. I reread this novel about a year ago. Some of it is clunky, but I agree with various reviewers that Brackett’s depiction of a man who has encountered the Unknown and come away irrevocably changed is done well. This, more than any of Brackett’s other stories, recalls Merritt’s Throckmartin in The Moon Pool.

The cover for a Spanish anthology depicting “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon”.

Finally, we must point out 1964’s “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon”. I have seen this tale called “Lovecraftian” numerous times, just as I have read many of Brackett’s other stories being called “Burroughsian”. It isn’t “Lovecraftian”—at least, it isn’t so any more than it is “Merrittesque”. Merritt preceded HPL in writing tales of cosmic horror, just as Merritt—barely—followed ERB in writing pulp tales of wild-ass, otherworldly adventure. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit” is a perfectly good example of pre-HPL cosmic horror. I’ve read people arguing—in an epically circular fashion—that Brackett must have been an HPL fan—for which there is no evidence—because of “Purple Priestess”. Brackett’s story almost reads like a parody of Merritt. I don’t think it is, but that is (kinda) how it reads (Brackett is not known to have ever written a parody of any author in her long career, by the way). Nonetheless, I’ve always enjoyed it for its full-throttle, over-the-top pulpiness.

That about wraps up this look at the (Merrittesque) works of Leigh Brackett. I hope I’ve illustrated a little bit of the influence that A. Merritt had upon her. I could write a whole ‘nother post…

Happy (belated) birthday, Leigh.