C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner were known in the Science Fiction world as the perfect husband-wife team. Kuttner could fall into bed late at night, his story unfinished, to wake and find his beautiful gal, Catherine, had completed the tale seamlessly. Even to this day scholars still argue about who wrote what.
But not all SF writer marriages are created the same. Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett married in 1946. Both had solid reputations in Science Fiction. But where Leigh was a seat-of-the-pants writer, Ed was not. Brackett put it this way: “He used to write the last line of the story before he’d ever write the first one.” It would surprise no one that these two did not write stories together under pseudonyms like Keith Hammond or Lewis Padgett.
I believed for years that the first and only time the two collaborated was on “Stark and the Star Kings”, a team-up of their two most popular characters that sat in limbo for thirty years. After reading the Tangent Online interview I found out this wasn’t true. The other time they had collaborated in fiction was three chapters in Hamilton’s The Valley of Creation. Robert A. W. Lowdnes had pointed out that spot in the novel as a great piece of Hamilton. Ed grudgingly admitted “Thank you for nothing. My wife wrote it.”
The other collaboration, and the one I want to look at here was a comic script called “The Lord of Batmanor” for Detective Comics #198 (August 1953). Ed had been writing for DC Comics since 1946 and had added to the Superman and Batman mythologies. “The Lord of Batmanor”, drawn by Dick Sprang and Charles Paris (but signed Bob Kane), was a twelve-pager that had Lord McLaughlie give his estate to Batman, in the hopes he can clear up a four hundred year old mystery. The McLaughlies had been charged with hiding the king’s gold, but the lord of the manor died in battle and nobody knew where the fortune was hidden. McLaughlie had hired an American detective named Sam Smathers but he turns out to be a crook, who brings his pals across the pond to steal the gold. To distract the locals Smathers uses a robotic Loch Ness Monster. Batman quickly discovers the truth and figures out where the gold is and how to catch the crooks.
The early Batman comics were detective comics as the name D.C. implies. The years of epic battles with the Joker and all that Dark Knight stuff was decades away. A reader in 1953 would expect that Batman and Robin, despite their weird costumes, to do some detective work. And who better to write a mystery than the man who created scientific wonder boy-detective Captain Future and the lady who wrote The Big Sleep screenplay with William Faulkner?
The actual breakdown of labor on this comic story has plot by Ed and script by Leigh, each job separate from the other. If that means anything it would have Hamilton coming up with all the mystery stuff but I doubt it was that cut-and-dry. The reason Hamilton asked Brackett to write the script is not known but likely he had some previous commitment for another DC comic. (Ed wrote only one fiction piece in 1953, “The Unforgiven” for Startling Stories, October 1953. Leigh was between films and writing largely for Planet Stories at the time.) The final product is a fun piece of Batman history that has been reprinted at least twice.
In 1959, Science Fiction writer Cleve Cartmill would pen (as Leslie Charteris) “The Convenient Monster” for The Saint Magazine, March 1959. The story would be filmed in 1966 with Roger Moore. I suspect Cartmill (who knew Ed and Leigh at least by reputation if not personally) had read the Batman comic six years earlier.
“The Lord of Batmanor” did not spark a long chain of collaborations. Like The Valley of Creation chapters, it was a necessary sharing of the workload. Both Ed and Leigh went on in their own directions, writing in their own way, together but separate. That is why “Stark and the Star Kings” is so special. Here was, at last, a true collaboration. Of it Hamilton said: “… what’s funny about it: the first half of it I wrote and it’s all about Stark. She wrote the part about the Star Kings.” After fifty years of writing for Ed, and forty for Leigh, the two had at last, found a way to work side by side.
