“We get him?” a man shouted.
“We got him!”
He lay there on the alley floor, then pushed himself to one elbow. He could not see very well and he was broken and split with pain.
He heard the police car stop back there, siren softly moaning.
“Back her up,” the man said, from inside the car that had struck him. “Quick, back her up and make sure!”
He watched, unable to move, as the car gunned viciously backward. Steel bumpers smashed him in the face.
Leigh Brackett
(1915–1978)
Until the runaway popularity of the female private eye in recent years, few women wrote hard-boiled and noir fiction. Most women authors seem to have preferred their crimes and misdemeanors to take place in surroundings more genteel than Raymond Chandler’s mean streets and to be couched in less graphic and violent prose. But a few women did enter what was perceived as a “man’s world” in the 1940s and 1950s, and some of them had significant careers. One was Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, who (under the pseudonym Craig Rice) created Chicago lawyer John J. Malone. Other notables were Helen Nielsen, M. V. Heberden, and Dolores Hitchens. But the woman with the most impressive body of work, whose achievements rank her as one of the top hard-boiled-fiction writers of all time, was Leigh Brackett.
Brackett was an avowed admirer of Chandler and the Black Mask school, and her novel No Good from a Corpse (1944), a southern California tale featuring private detective Edmond Clive, is so Chandleresque in style and approach that it might have been written by Chandler. Indeed, Brackett was one of the co-authors of the screenplay of The Big Sleep in 1946, and twenty-five years later she wrote the script for the Robert Altman-Elliot Gould film version of The Long Goodbye (1973). The Tiger Among Us and An Eye for an Eye, her two 1957 suspense novels, are also powerful noir stories set against midwestern backdrops.
Oddly, 1957 was the only year in the 1950s in which Brackett published crime fiction; the balance of her output during that decade consisted of science fiction and screenplays. “So Pale, So Cold, So Fair,” a gripping tale of political corruption and murder in a small Ohio town where “sin is organized, functional, and realistic,” first appeared in the men’s magazine Argosy in July 1957. Like the best of her handful of crime shorts published in the 1940s, this story contains echoes not only of Chandler, but of both Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain. It might well have been featured in Black Mask one or two decades earlier — a magazine in which Brackett did not appear even once.
B. P.
So Pale, So Cold, So Fair
(1957)
Chapter One
She was the last person in the world I expected to see. But she was there, in the moonlight, lying across the porch of my rented cabin.
She wore a black evening dress, and little sandals with very high heels. At her throat was a gleam of dim fire that even by moonlight you knew had to be made by nothing less than diamonds. She was very beautiful. Her name was Marjorie, and once upon a time, a thousand years ago, she had been engaged to me.
That was a thousand years ago. If you checked the calendar it would only say eight and a half, but it seemed like a thousand to me. She hadn’t married me. She married Brian Ingraham, and she was still married to him, and I had to admit she had probably been right, because he could buy her the diamonds and I was still just a reporter for the Fordstown Herald.
I didn’t know what Marjorie Ingraham was doing on my porch at two-thirty-five of a Sunday morning. I stood still on the graveled path and tried to figure it out.
The poker game was going strong in Dave Schuman’s cabin next door. I had just left it. The cards had not been running my way, and the whiskey had, and about five minutes ago I had decided to call it a night. I had walked along the lake shore, looking with a sort of vague pleasure at the water and the sky, thinking that I still had eight whole days of vacation before I had to get back to my typewriter again.
And now here was Marjorie, lying across my porch.
I couldn’t figure it out.
She had not moved. There was a heavy dew, and the drops glistened on her cheeks like tears. Her eyes were closed. She seemed to be sleeping.
“Marjorie?” I said. “Marjorie—”
There wasn’t any answer.
I went up to the low step and reached across it and touched her bare shoulder. It was not really cold. It only felt that way because of the dew that was on it.
I laid my fingers on her throat, above the diamonds. I waited and waited, but there was no pulse. Her throat was faintly warm, too. It felt like marble that has been for a time in the sun. I could see the two dark, curved lines of her brows and the shadows of her lashes. I could see her mouth, slightly parted. I held my hand over it and there was nothing, no slightest breath. All of her was still, as still and remote as the face of the moon.
She was not sleeping. She was dead.
I stood there, hanging onto the porch rail, feeling sick as the whiskey turned in me and the glow went out. A lot of thoughts went through my mind about Marjorie, and now suddenly she was gone, and I would not have believed it could hit me so hard. The night and the world rocked around me, and then, when they steadied down again, I began to feel another emotion.
Alarm.
Marjorie was dead. She was on my porch, laid out with her skirt neat and her eyes closed, and her hands folded across her waist. I didn’t think it was likely she had come there by herself and then suddenly died in just that position. Someone had brought her and put her there, on purpose.
But who? And why?
I ran back to Dave Schuman’s.
I must have looked like calamity, because the minute I came in the door they forgot the cards and stared at me, and Dave got up and said, “Greg, what is it?”
“I think you better come with me,” I said, meaning all of them. “I want witnesses.”
I told them why. Dave’s face tightened, and he said, “Marge Ingraham? My God.” Dave, who is in the circulation department of the Herald, went to school with me and Marjorie and knows the whole story.
He grabbed a flashlight and went out the door, and the local physician, our old poker pal Doc Evers, asked me, “Are you sure she’s dead?”
“I think so. But I want you to check it.”
He was already on his way. There were three other guys beside Dave Schuman and Doc Evers and me: another member of the Herald gang; Hughie Brown, who ran Brown’s Boat Livery on the lake; and a young fellow who was a visiting relation or something of Hughie’s. We hurried back along the lake shore and up the gravel path.
Marjorie had not gone away.
Somebody turned on the porch light. The hard, harsh glare beat down, more cruel but more honest than the moonlight.
Hughie Brown’s young relative said, in a startled kind of way, “But she can’t be dead, look at the color in her skin.”
Doc Evers grunted and bent over her. “She’s dead, all right. At a rough guess, three or four hours.”
“How?” I asked.
“As the boy says, look at the color of her skin. That usually indicates carbon-monoxide poisoning.”