(1923-1985)
The hard-boiled detective story had slowly, steadily made its way around the world in the years following its invention in America in the early 1920s. The original stories and novels were distributed in other countries with great success and certain foreign writers began to attempt to copy the form. By the 1930s the style had been adopted by English hard-boiled imitators like James Hadley chase and Peter cheyney, and in the 1940s it was given a Gallic transfer by such French writers as Leo Malet (b. 1909) and Boris Vian (1920-59). In the 1950s, the Australians produced a number of their own homegrown masters of American-style crime fiction, and none was more successful or prolific than Alan Geoffrey Yates, better known by his durable pen name of Carter Brown.
Born in England, Yates immigrated to Australia after World War II and service in the Royal Navy. He worked as a traveling salesman before starting to sell pulp fiction stories to Australian periodicals. In the beginning he wrote anything— crime, horror stories, and westerns under the pen name of Tex Conrad. From the early ’50s, however, he began to concentrate almost exclusively on his American-style detective stories. In early years he used the name of Peter Carter Brown. Like Chase and Cheyney and others before him, Yates’s knowledge of America and the sort of underworld milieu and jargon he imitated came strictly from reading the earlier works in the genre. His own sensibility dictated an imitation not so much of the realistic hard-boiled strain of Dashiell hammett and Raymond chandler but of the more hyperbolic and tongue-in-cheek hard-boiled pros like Carrol John daly and Robert Leslie bellem, and perhaps the newly launched Shell Scott series of zany hard-boiled mysteries by Richard Prather. Carter Brown’s mock American prose read a bit like the conclusion of a game of “telephone,” in which the person at the end of the line can repeat the gist of the story but gets a lot of the words wrong. It didn’t matter much in the beginning, since Brown’s early topics were intended only for an Australian audience.
Horwitz, one of Sydney’s leading paperback houses, had great success with Carter Brown’s zesty adventures, and Brown supplied them at the rate of more than one per month. Eventually the series was picked up by the New American Library paperback developer in the united States, and either American readers didn’t notice Brown’s sometimes tin-eared version of U.S. speech patterns and slang, or else they were so agreeably entertained by Brown’s brisk, breezy style and abundance of sexual content that they just didn’t care. The Carter Brown paperbacks sold in the tens of millions for the decades Brown supplied them, almost as popular in America as they were in Australia and Great Britain. Brown wrote simple, fast, and furious, with a brisk plot, lots of dialogue, wisecracks, action, and beautiful women. The American versions of the topics were attractively packaged with sleek, pulpy cover illustrations, usually by Barye Phillips or Robert McGinnis.
In the beginning Brown’s topics were standalone mysteries and detective stories, but after a few years of those he developed a number of series characters and featured them in the bulk of his subsequent hundreds of titles. In addition to a number of fairly conventional trench-coated, hard-drinking crime fighters, Brown featured a few more original protagonists, notably his curvaceous, bubbly female private eye Mavis Seidlitz (star of Honey, Here’s Your Hearse, A Bullet for My Baby, Good Morning, Lament for a Lousy Lover, and possibly more), and Larry Baker, a studio screenwriter who must solve the sorts of crimes only the crackpot denizens of Tinsel Town would think of committing.
The Carter Brown topics evolved through the years with changing market trends, adjusting to the craze for Ian fleming’s James Bond gimmickry, and in the 1970s feeding topic buyers’ supposed need for more, and more explicit, sex scenes.
In the 1980s one of the Carter Brown mysteries became the basis for a stage musical called The Stripper, staged by the Sydney Theatre Company.
Works
- And the Undead Sing (1974);
- Angel (1962);
- Angry Amazons, The (1972);
- Aseptic Murders, The (1972);
- Baby, You’re Guilt-Edged (1956);
- Bella Donna Was Poison (1957);
- Bid the Babe Bye-Bye (1956);
- Black Lace Hangover, The (1966);
- Blonde, Beautiful, and Blam! (1956);
- Blonde, The (1955);
- Blonde on a Broomstick (1966);
- Blonde on the Rocks (1963);
- Blonde Verdict (1956);
- Body, The (1958);
- Bombshell, The (1960);
- Booty for a Babe (1956);
- Born Loser, The (1973);
- Brazen, The (1960);
- Bribe Was Beautiful, The (1956);
- Bullet for My Baby, A (1955);
- Bump and Grind Murders, The (1964);
- Burden of Guilt (1970);
- Caress Before Killing (1956);
- Catch Me a Phoenix (1965);
- Charlie Sent Me (1963);
- Charmer Chased, The (1958);
- Chorine Makes a Killing (1957);
- Clown, The (1972);
- Coffin Bird, The (1970);
- Corpse, The (1958);
- Corpse for Christmas, A (1965);
- Covert, The (1971);
- Creative Murders, The (1971);
- Curtains for a Chorine (1955);
- Curves for the Coroner (1955);
- Cutie Cashed His Chips (1955), also published as The Savage Salome;
- Cutie Takes the Count (1958);
- Dame, The (1959);
- Dance of Death, The (1964);
- Darling You’re Doomed (1956);
- Deadly Kitten, The (1967);
- Deadly Miss (1958);
- Death of a Doll (1956), also published as The Everloving Blues;
- Deep Cold Green, The (1968);
- Delilah Was Deadly (1956);
- Desired, The (1959);
- Die Anytime, After Tuesday (1969);
- Donavan (1974);
- Donavan’s Day (1975);
- Donna Died Laughing (1956);
- Dream Is Deadly, The (1960);
- Dumdum Murder, The (1962);
- Early Boyd, The (1975);
- Exotic, The (1961);
- Flagelator, The (1969);
- Frame Is Beautiful, The (1953);
- Fraulein Is Feline (1953);
- Girl from Outer Space, The (1965);
- Girl in a Shroud (1963);
- Girl Who Was Possessed, The (1963);
- Goddess Gone Bad (1958);
- Good Year for Dwarfs, (1970);
- Graves, I Dig (1960);
- Had I But Groaned (1968);
- Hammer of Thor, The (1965);
- Hang Up Kid, The (1970);
- Hellcat, The (1962);
- Hi Fi Fadeout (1958);
- High Fashion in Homicide (1958);
- Homicide Hoyden (1954);
- Honey, Here’s Your Hearse (1955);
- Hong Kong Caper, The (1962);
- Hoodlum Was a Honey, The (1956);
- House of Sorcery (1967);
- Ice Cold in Ermine (1958);
- Ice Cold Nude, The (1962);
- Invisible Flamini, The (1971);
- Iron Maiden, The (1975);
- Jade Eyed Jungle, The (1963);
- Kiss and Kill (1955);
- Lady Has No Convictions, The (1956);
- Lady Is Available, The (1963);
- Lady Is Chased, The (1953);
- Lady Is Transparent, The (1962);
- Lament for a Lousy Lover (1960);
- Last Note for a Lovely (1957);
- Lover, The (1958);
- Lover, Don’t Come Back (1962);
- Loving and the Dead, The (1959);
- Luck Was No Lady (1958);
- Madam, You’re Mayhem (1957);
- Maid for Murder (1954);
- Manhattan Cowboy (1973);
- Master, The (1973);
- Mermaid Murmurs Murder (1953);
- Mini-Murders, The (1968);
- Minx Is Murder, The (1957);
- Miss Called Murder (1955);
- Mistress, The (1958);
- Model of No Virtue (1956);
- Morgue Amour, A (1954);
- Murder Among Us, The (1962);
- Murder by Miss-Demeanor (1956);
- Murder in the Family Way (1971);
- Murder in the Key Club (1962);
- Murder Is the Message (1969);
- Murder Is a Package Deal (1964);
- Murder Is My Mistress (1954);
- Murder Is So Nostalgic (1972);
- Murder on High (1973);
- Murder Wears a Mantilla (1957);
- Myopic Mermaid, The (1961);
- Negative in Blue (1974);
- Nemesis Wore Nylons (1954);
- Never Was Girl, The (1964);
- Night Wheeler (1975);
- No Blonde Is an Island (1965);
- No Body She Knows (1958);
- No Future, Fair Lady (1958);
- No Halo for Hedy (1956);
- No Harp for My Angel (1956);
- No Tears from the Widow (1966);
- No Time for Leola (1967);
- None but the Lethal Heart (1959);
- Nude with a View (1965);
- Nymph to the Slaughter (1963);
- Only the Very Rich (1969);
- Passionate, The (1959);
- Passionate Pagan, The (1963);
- Phreak Out (1975);
- Play Now—Kill Later (1966);
- Plush Lined Coffin, The (1967);
- Pornbroker, The (1972);
- Ride the Roller Coaster (1975);
- Sad Eyed Seductress, The (1961);
- Scarlet Flush, The (1963);
- Seidlitz and the Super-Spy (1967);
- Seven Sirens, The (1972);
- Sex Clinic, The (1971);
- Shady Lady (1953);
- Shamus, Your Slip Is Showing (1955);
- Silken Nightmare, The (1964);
- Sinfully Yours (1958);
- Sinner, You Slay Me (1957);
- So Deadly, Sinner (1959), also published as Walk Softly, Witch;
- So Lovely She Lies (1958);
- So Move the Body (1973);
- So What Killed the Vampire? (1966);
- Sob Sister Cries Murder (1955);
- Sometime Wife, The (1965);
- Star-Crossed Lover, The (1974);
- Streaked Blonde Slave, The (1969);
- Strictly for Felony (1956);
- Stripper, The (1961);
- Stroud for My Sugar (1955);
- Suddenly by Violence (1959);
- Sweetheart, This Is Homicide (1956);
- Target for Their Dark Desire (1966);
- Tempt a Tigress (1958);
- Temptress, The (1960);
- Ten Grand Tallulah and Temptation (1957);
- Terror Comes Creeping (1959);
- Tigress, The (1961);
- Tomorrow Is Murder (1960);
- True Son of the Beast (1970);
- Two Timing Blonde, The (1955);
- Unorthodox Corpse, The (1957);
- Until Temptation Do Us Part (1967);
- Up Tight Blonde, The (1969);
- Velvet Vixen, The (1964);
- Venus Unarmed (1953);
- Victim, The (1959);
- W.H.O.R.E. (1971);
- Wanton, The (1959);
- Wayward Wahine, The (1960);
- Wench Is Wicked, The (1955);
- Wheeler Fortune (1974);
- Wheeler, Dealer! (1975);
- Where Did Charity Go? (1970);
- White Bikini, The (1963);
- Who Killed Dr. Sex? (1964);
- Widow Bewitched (1958);
- Wind Up Doll, The (1963);
- Wreath for a Redhead (1957);
- Wreath for Rebecca (1965);
- Yogi Shrouds Yolanda (1965);
Zelda (1961) As A. G. Yates:
- Cold Dark Hours (1958)
