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Carter Brown (1923-1985) - Pseudonym for Allan Geoffrey Yates, who also wrote as Caroline Farr, Tom Conway and Paul Valdez | |
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Australian paperback writer Alan G. Yates poured from his typewriter between 1953-68 under the name Carter Brown about 150 crime stories, with sales in the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of copies. His last books appeared in the early 1980's. All the stories were set in the Unites States, but Carter Brown series never became there so well-known as in Europe. Yates's novels had light atmosphere and his heroes could deliver more wise-guy remarks than Robert B. Parker's famous private detective Spencer. "As she moved toward the bar, the tight jerk of her black sequinned buttocks was definitely more nervous than sultry. But that was life, I figured with comicbook philosophy: the girl of your dreams wound up as an undressed waitress equipped with an built-in scream ready for action if you even stared too hard at her overexposed charms." (from Murder in the Key Club by Carter Brown, New York: Signet Books, 1962, p. 8) Carter Brown was born Alan Geoffrey Yates in London and educated at schools in Essex. From 1942 to 1946, he served in the Royal Navy as a lieutenant. After the war, he worked as a sound recordist at Gaumont-British Films for two years and moved to Australia in 1948. In the same year, he became an Australian citizen. Before devoting himself entirely to writing from 1953, Yates was a salesman in Sydney and a public relations staff member at Quatas Empire Airways. His early books were intended only for Australian audience; they loveown books. While at Quantas, he wrote mysteries for Horwitz's Scientific Thriller series. When Carter Brown series was picked up by Signet, he found
readers also in the United States. There his book covers were often
illustrated by Barye Phillips and Robert McGinnis. In France, Gallimard
began to publish Carter Brown's works from 1959 in Série Noire,
which introduced to French readers such writers as James Hadley Chase,
Peter Cheyney, Horace McCoy, Jonathan Latimer, Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. Yates published in 1958 also a
novel under his own name, The Cold Dark Hours, and in 1966
appeared the first novels written as Caroline Farr. His major work in
science fiction was Coriolanus, the Chariot! (1978), a story
about illusions, paranoia, and a toxic game. – Yates lived in the
fashionable Sydney suburb of St Ives and worked from home. He was
married with Denise Sinclair Mackellar; they had one daughter and three
sons. Yates died of a heart attack on May 5, 1985. He was 61 years old. In the beginning of his career, Yates penned crime, horror stories, and westerns under the name of Tex Conrad. For the magazine Thrills Incorporated he cowrote around 1950 some tales with G.C. Bleek. When he was asked to write a mystery series as "Peter Carter Brown," Yates put his name on a thirty-year contract. According to this paper, he was required to produce two novelettes and one full-length novel a month for Horwitz Publications, one of Sydney's leading paperback houses. The first was The Lady Is Murderer , which appeared in September 1951. Soon Yates produced a flood of crime fiction: in 1953 Venus Unarmed, The Mermaid Murmurs Murder, Chased, The Frame is Beautiful, Fraulein Is Feline, Wreath for Rebecca, The Black Widow Weeps, and The Penthouse Passout. Yates
was able to write 40,000 words overnight. Occasionally
he used
Dexedrine to stay awake during a 48-hour continuous writing. In the
late 1950s, Yates' inability to meet the deadlines
began to worry Stanley Horwitz. Also Yates himself grew increasingly
frustrated with Signet's standardised formula and changes made by
oversee editors. While he was negotiating with Signet in 1958 in the
United States, allegedly the Horwitz editor C.J. McKenzie was
commissioned to write "half a dozen" Carter Brown books under his
editorship. A new contract, which halved Yates's workload, was made in
1961. His annual earnings were close to £25,000, at the time when the
average weekly wage for men was around £24 and £13 for women. ('Only Once or Twice, and Always in the Daytime: The Lost World of Australian Pulp' by Ian Morrison, The Univrsity of Melbourne Library Journal, Volume 6, Number I, May 2000, pp. 6-7) "The Brown books are the direct descendants of the "spicy" detective pulps like Hollywood Detective and Spicy Detective, which occupied the opposite end of the respectability scale from the revered Black Mask." ('Brown, Carter' by Art Scott, in Twentieth
Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly, London: St. James Press, 1985, p. 111) Like the British writers Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase,
Yates set his
stories in the United States, but he had acquited most of his knowledge
of America from books and Hollywood films. "Do you go to the movies
often, Lieutenant?" she asked politely. "Once," I said, "to get in out
of the rain. A thing called Birth of a Nation. I figured it was about sex, but I got gypped." (from The Dame, New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1959) European readers enjoyed Brown's local coloring to the full, without any doubts, and hard-boiled style in the vein of Carrol John Daly, Robert Leslie Bellem and Richard Prather. American readers did not pay much attention to his Australian version of U.S. speech patterns and slang. "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." ('Brown, Carter (A. G. Yates),' in Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers by Lee Server, New York: Facts on File, 2014, p. 40) However, Signet's co-founder Kurt Enoch was satisfied with Carter Brown novels: "Pace, plot, style are good," he said of The Corpse (1958), an Al Wheeler novel, which is one of the most reprinted titles. For the American audience, the manuscripts were edited. From the beginning of his career, Yates played with the titles of his books, which
referred to
other works. The Loving and the Dead (1959) was a
modification of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Murder
is My Mistress (1954) was not far from Raymond Chandler's Trouble
Is My Business (1950), and No Halo for Hedy (1956) echoed
James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939). Kiss Me Deadly (1955) recalled the title of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly (1952). The Brown books were fast paced, they had humor and action, and several corpses, although not much violence. Women are gorgeous, and the story is usually set among the rich and glamorous. The plots have turns that are not very believable. In one mystery a night club is used as a distribution center for drugs. The stripper hides heroin into her G-string and swaps it during her performance for a buyer's tie, in which the payoff is sewn into the lining. Yates knew more about literature than his average readers and his specialty was to refer to famous films, novels or works of art. In The Dame (1959) he quoted John Keats and then twisted the lines in ironic context as the story continued. Up to the 1970s, the sex scenes were comparatively mild,
but then they began to develop into more explicit direction and the cover art turned into soft-core pornography. The change
did not please all readers. Last Carter Brown novels appeared in the
early 1980s. Usually the novels were ignored by the critics, but the
mystery writer Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) reviewed them in his
columns, which were published in the Sunday New York Times Book
Review. He included Until Temptation Do Us Depart (1967), an Al Wheeler paperback, in his list of 68 Important titles in the mystery field; it was put between The Private Wound by Nicholas Blake (1968) and The Cool Man (1968) by W.R. Burnett. (The Essential Mystery Lists: For Readers, Collectors, and Librarians, compiled and edited by Roger M. Sobin, Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2007, p. 322) Despite Carter Brown's popularity, the novels have inspired
only a few film or stage adaptations. In 1961, Yates met in New York
Murray Burnett, the co-author of Casablanca, who was interested
in the performance rights of Zelda (1961), set in the
home of Zelda Roxanne, the "Hollywood's goddess of love". Curtains
for a Chorine (1955) was made into a comedy film by Maurice
Labro in 1963 under the title Blague dans le coin, starring
Fernandel, Perrette Pradier and Eliane D'Almeida. And one book inspired
in the 1980s a stage musical, called The Stripper, staged by
the Sydney Theatre Company. Marlene Dietrich owned a collection of Carter Browns. ('The Promiscuous Carter Brown' by Toni Johnson-Woods, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Special Issue, 2008, p. 182) A typical Carter Brown story did not take itself too
seriously
– it was a mixture of sex, action, and humor. "And the hell with
chronological order. You start off saying, 'It was raining the day I
was born', and the first thing you know your reader has switched on the
television and trown your book out of the window. On the first page
you've got to grab your reader by the short hairs and pull them
straight into the book. Like I've just done to you, right? (You'll have
to speak up, I don't hear negatives too good.)" (Ready When You are, C.B.!: The Autobiography of Alan Yates Alias Carter Brown, Melbourne, Macmillan, 1983) The curvateous private detective Mavis Seidlitz, who "plays hard and fast with men . . . money . . . and murder," was Yates's female hero. Mavis works with Johnny Rio, who believes that thinking is his strong suit and do not give her difficult cases. "Sometimes I figure Johnny must think I'm dumb or someting, but that's stupid. Would I be a partner in Rio Investigations if I was dumb? Would I have taken a cut in salary to become a partner if I didn't have ambitions?" (The Loving and the Dead, New York: A Signer Book, 1959, p. 6) Rio appears on the scene when Mavis is in trouble. In Good Morning, Mavis (1957?) she travels to New Orleans, where she is kissed several times during Mardi Grass festival and proposed once. Her client is killed and becomes a zombie – or so Mavis believes. She is kidnapped by a monk and a jester and then saved by an undercover detective from the district attorney's office. Mavis works in The Bump and Grind Murders (1964) as a stripper to catch a killer. She plays a bodyguard to a frightened 'exotic dancer' and reveals her knowledge of Russian literature: ". . . he was just like one of the characters in that book the college boy I dated a few times used to read to me: it was written by some Russian who had enough sense to write it in English so we could read it, and it was called The Brother Caramba's Off! I guess if he could write it in English, I couldn't object to him using Spanish in the title." Other Mavis stories include Honey, Here's Your Hearse (1955), A Bullet for My Baby (1955), and Lament for a Lousy Lover (1960). Yates's best known hero was Al Wheeler, a homicide lieutenant from the fictional Pine City Sheriff's Office, California. Wheeler made his first appearance in The Wench Is Wicked (1955). In Walk Softly, Witch (1959) Wheeler investigates an insurance fraud, meets voluptuous secretaries and widows, and takes more than a few drinks before he shoots the criminal who has just shot his deceitful female accomplice. Larry Baker, a Hollywood screenwriter, and his drunk partner Boris Slivka, solved crackpot crimes. Rick Holmas was a Hollywood PI, and Randy Roberts a San Francisco lawyer. For further reading: 'Brown, Carter (A.G. Yates),' in Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers by Lee Server (2014); 'The Promiscuous Carter Brown' by Toni Johnson-Woods, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (Special Issue, 2008); 'The Mysterious Case of Carter Brown: or, Who Really Killed the Australian Author?' by Toni Johnson-Woods, in Who's Who?: Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crises in Australian Literature, eds. Maggie Nolan,Carrie Dawson (2004); 'Brown, Carter' by Art Scott, in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); 'Carter Brown, Writer; Books Sold in Millions,' The New York Times (May 8, 1985); Ready When You Are, C.B.!: The Autobiography of Alan Yates Alias Carter Brown (1983) - Suomeksi Carter Brownin kirjoja on julkaistu n. 140, kuten Cissie oli tähti, Gilda oli pimu, Mestariampuja, Samettikettu, Se oli hasardia, Se oli murha - näissä suomennoksista vastasi Tapio Hiisivaara. Teosten kustantajana oli Valpas-mainos, muutaman myös kustansi Viihdeviikarit. Hiisivaaran lisäksi suomentajina olivat mm. Viljo Ensio Kukkonen, Hannes Hunttila, Terttu Hagström, Sirkka Tuominen ja Erkki Erkkilä. Kirjat ilmestyivät halpoina pokkareina ja niitä levitettiin kioskien kautta. Yleensä Carter Brownien sivumäärä oli noin puolitoista sataa, kannessa oli vetonaulana vähäpukeinen nainen ja teksti "Maailman eniten myyty!" Vaikka Carter Browneja löytyy vielä helposti antikvariaattien hyllyistä yhden euron hintaan, niitä myös on ryhdytty keräilemään, ja sen mukana hintojen voidaan odottaa nousevan. Selected works:
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