Leigh Brackett: "The Tapestry Gate," "Design for Dying" and "So Pale, So Cold, So Fair"

It's been a while since we've read anything by Leigh Brackett, who, besides writing all those science fiction adventure stories we've read, worked on screenplays for films directed by people like Howard Hawks and Robert Altman and starring people like Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne and penned well-respected detective fiction--Bill Pronzini, in Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, says Brackett has the "most impressive body of work" of a woman in "hard-boiled and noir fiction," compares her stories to those of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain, and judges that Brackett's "achievements rank her as one of the top hard-boiled fiction writers of all time...."

Let's read two crime tales by Brackett, including one selected by Pronzini for Hard-Boiled, and round this blog post out to three pieces with a story of weird horror story by Brackett. 

"The Tapestry Gate" (1940)

This looks like one of Brackett's earliest published works.  "The Tapestry Gate" debuted in an issue of Strange Stories, where it appeared alongside stories by Henry Kuttner and August Derleth that we are quite likely to read some day and was illustrated by Hannes Bok. 

Brackett has a reputation as a book-loving tomboy, and this story starts off by introducing us to a woman who wears too much make up and a hat Brackett calls "a monstrosity" who is badgering her husband and issuing complaints like "You always have your nose poked into some silly book...."  The unhappy couple is at an auction, and while Mr. Stratton just wants to keep up the "sporting print" that hangs in his den, Mrs. Stratton, who redecorates the house multiple times a year to follow trends, insists they bid on a "patternless" tapestry she declares "as modern as Dali" she wants to hang in the print's place.  They win the auction, and carry the tapestry to the car.  On the sidewalk a "Negro bootblack" sees the tapestry and cries out "De Good Lawd have mussy!"  He tells the rich couple that the tapestry reminds him of something he saw in a Louisiana conjure woman's swamp hut and warns then it is a work of black magic the purpose of which is to steal people's souls!  

Even after the Strattons realize the tapestry is made of real human hair, Mrs. Stratton goes ahead with her plan to hang in her husband's den.  The "Negro" told them that the thing was activated by "hate," and, sure enough, when Mr. Stratton's hate for his wife, who runs his life for him, fills his house with decor he detests, and wastes all his money, boils over he begins to dream of the tapestry sucking out the missus's soul, and even see images of satanic rituals in the tapestry's apparently random patterns. 

"I wish it were true!" he whispered savagely.  "I wish the damned thing were a trap.  I wish Jane were dead and in hell!"

Can Startton take advantage of the tapestry's eldritch powers to liberate himself from the old ball and chain, or will he be hoist by his own petard?

This is a pretty good black magic story wedded to a tale of a disastrous marriage.  Two great tastes that taste great together!  "The Tapestry Gate" would be selected by Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg for their 1996 anthology 100 Tiny Tales of Terror and you can also find it in 2002's Martian Quest: The Early Brackett.

"Design for Dying" (1944)

I'm reading this caper in a scan of a 1951 issue of New Detective, which presents itself as "The NEWest in Crime Fiction."  Despite this braggadocio, "Design for Dying" premiered in 1944 in Flynn's Detective Fiction, appearing in the US edition in June and the Canadian edition in August.

One of the things that is memorable about Brackett's work is the sexualized violence (see "Murder in the Family," "Enchantress of Venus" and "The Citadel of Lost Ages") and Brackett starts "Design for Dying" off with a scene in which a man puts his hands around his wife's neck, as if to strangle her, but they end up kissing for the first time in 14 years.

You see, the male component of this tumultuous relationship, our narrator Chris, is, or was, a prominent member of the New York mob world, and he recently escaped prison and has finally caught up with his wife, Jo, who has been living on the West Coast with her brother Sligh.  ("Sligh?"  Here's a name I haven't heard before.)  Jo and Sligh were accomplices to Chris's crimes, but The Man was never able to pin anything on them.  Chris suspects the brother and sister team set him up, and after fourteen years in stir has come west to exact revenge on them, but his murderous plans are quickly shelved when Jo convinces Chris she had nothing to do with his arrest and conviction and when news arrives that Sligh has been killed in a car accident--or was he rubbed out by the Molino gang?

George Molino is a West Coast mob boss who is getting on in years and wants Chris, a man renowned for his criminal brain, to run his operations for him.  Molino's people, it appears, took care of Sligh and made it look like an accident so Chris wouldn't draw attention to himself by killing Sligh on his own.  Chris takes up Molino on his offer and Molino's organization employs elaborate measures, including plastic surgery, to make sure Chris and Jo are not recognized and Chris can safely begin his new career managing Molino's organization.

The second part of "Design for Dying" covers the struggle for power within the organization between new boy Chris and members of Molino's staff who had been hoping Molino was going to promote from within.  There are fights, people get tied up, people get shot, people who have been shot stagger around bleeding and using their last breathes to cryptically divulging valuable information.  These men aren't just fighting over power, they are fighting over Jo, and you can believe that Jo is struck, is kissed against her will, and has her clothes torn so her skin--"white as new milk"--is exposed.  While enduring this harsh treatment Jo is pursuing her own goal, striving to convince Chris she isn't conspiring against him with any of these other hoods.  One of Brackett's themes in this story is how people change--Chris's appearance has been changed physically, and he has a different name, different clothes and even a different gait, but when Jo sadly laments that "You're not Chris anymore...you're somebody I don't know, and I'm afraid of you," she is referring to deeper changes still.

The third part of the story reveals the secret Chris and we readers have been suspecting, that Sligh is still alive and he is the real power behind the George Molino mob.  Sligh wants Chris to be his partner in an ambitious criminal project with the potential to reap tremendous rewards, but Chris is still bitter over Sligh's setting him up 14 years ago.  Who will get shot in the final struggle, and who will survive?  Is Jo in cahoots with Sligh or did she really think he had died in a car crash?  Is there any chance that Chris and Jo can make a change for the better, get out of the crime game and live an ordinary straight life together?

"Design for Dying" is an acceptable little bit of violent entertainment in which men and women get the crap beat out of them but which also leaves open the possibility of redemption, cherishing the hope that people who have done terrible things can make good and earn forgiveness. 

"So Pale, So Cold, So Fair" (1957)

"So Pale, So Cold, So Fair" appeared in a 1957 issue of Argosy, a magazine that endured from 1882 to 1978.  This is the Brackett story Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian reprinted in their 1995 anthology Hard-Boiled; three years later Rosemary Herbert included it in her 1998 anthology Twelve American Crime Stories. 

Greg Carver, our narrator, is a journalist in an Ohio town not far from the Pennsylvania border.  Greg has made enemies in the local government and the organized crime syndicate that has that government in its pocket by reporting on their shenanigans.  Greg's face still bears the scars from a beating he received that put him in the hospital for weeks, and he bears further scars on his soul--some eight years ago he was dating a beautiful woman, Marjorie, hoping to marry her, but she decided to marry Brian Ingraham--the top lawyer for the syndicate!  

As the story begins, Greg is on a vacation with a bunch of friends, out by a lake where they fish and play cards.  Greg returns to his cabin to hit the hay and finds Marjorie's dead body laid out on doorstep to his cabin!  One of his friends is a doctor and suggests she died in the last three or four hours of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The cops judge Marjorie's death a suicide, and don't seem too interested in figuring out who transported the beautiful corpse twenty miles to deliver it to Greg's vacation spot.  Both Greg and Brian the widower seem inclined to put the whole nightmare out of their minds, but then an attractive girl comes to visit the drunk and grieving Greg and gets the plot rolling.  Sheila Harding says she was a close friend of Marjorie's and she is pretty sure Marjorie was murdered by the syndicate because Marjorie was investigating the murder of Sheila's brother Bill!  Bill was a junior executive at a factory and died in an "accident" because he was going to expose the men behind the "numbers racket--the bug he called it--that was taking thousands of dollars out of the men's paychecks every month."  Sheila thinks the person who moved Marjorie's body to Greg's doorstep did so in hopes of inspiring Greg to restart his journalistic crusade against the criminals.

Greg starts investigating, you know, going hither and yon, talking to people and looking for clues, and the criminals who run the town beat him up, repeatedly, and then finally hold him captive.  Greg takes advantage of the internecine conflict within the gang (it was one of the organization's top guys who brought the body of Marjorie to Greg, hoping Greg would bring down the big crime boss) and there are scenes of guys shooting each other and wrestling on the floor, grappling for possession of a pistol; in the end, Greg has liberated the town from the gangsters and avenged Marjorie.

**********

The two detective stories are competent and entertaining, but I have to admit that I prefer Brackett's horror tale, "The Tapestry Gate."  Maybe this is because I am just addicted to speculative--science fiction or supernatural--elements and so stories that lack futuristic or weird elements feel empty to me, but I also think the disastrous relationship between the Strattons--the wife's domineering, the husband's desperation and murderous rage--make them more interesting, or at least more relatable, characters than the hoods in the crime stories.  

(I feel like there are plenty of people who are more interested in the covers of SF books and magazines than in the contents, find all the paintings of monsters and sexy girls and musclemen and space craft and surreal imagery compelling or fun, but are totally uninterested in the actual stories.  I kind of feel that way about crime fiction--often the covers of detective magazines and paperbacks are terrific, the paintings of guys like Norman Saunders and Robert McGinnis or just the abstracted representations of skulls, daggers, and twisted dead bodies, but the actual stories are often just an account of some guy doing research, figuring out a puzzle, and occasionally getting beaten up.) 

Our previous blog post was about a Henry Kuttner detective novel, The Murder of Eleanor Pope, and with today's two Brackett crime stories I think that's enough "realistic" mystery fiction for a while; we'll be back to our regular stomping grounds of science fiction and sword and sorcery during the next few posts.