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Carter Brown Biography and List of Works

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Australian paperback writer Alan G. Yates, who, under the psuedonym of Carter Brown, poured from his typewriter between 1953-68 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 of Yates' stories are set in the Unites States, but he never became so well-known in America as in Europe. Yates's novels have a light atmosphere and his heroes deliver more wise-guy remarks than Robert B. Parker's famous private detective Spencer.

"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, 1959)

Yates was born in London and educated at various 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 , Yates was a salesman in Sydney and a public relations staff member at Quantas Empire Airways. His career began with a flood of books: VENUS UNARMED, THE MERMAID MURMURS MURDER, THE LADY IS CHASED, THE FRAME IS BEAUTIFUL, FRAULEIN IS FELINE, WREATH FOR REBECCA, THE BLACK WIDOW WEEPS and THE PENTHOUSE PASSOUT, were all published in 1953. In 1958 he published a novel under his own name, THE COLD DARK HOURS, and in 1966 the first novels written as Caroline Farr appeared. In France Gallimard published Carter Brown's works in 1959 in Série Noire (number 477), which also published such authors as James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyney, Horace McCoy, Jonathan Latimer, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain.

The Brown books are fast paced, they have humour, action, and several corpses, although not much violence. Women are gorgeous, and the story is usually set among the rich and glamorous. The plot twists are often unbelievable: In one story a night club is used as a distribution centre 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 reader and his speciality is to refer to famous films, novels or works of art. In THE DAME (1959) he quotes John Keats and then twists the lines in an ironic context as the story continued. Up to the 1970s his sex scenes were comparatively mild, but then started to be explicit. The change did not please all readers.The 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. Yates was married to Denise Sinclair Mackellar; they had one daughter and three sons. Yates died on May 5, 1985.

A typical Carter Brown book does not take itself too seriously - it is a mixture of sex, action, and humour. Yates's female hero is the private detective Mavis Seidliz, whose feminine weapons are more developed than her mental capacities. Mavis works with Johnny Rio, who believes that thinking is his department and does not give her difficult cases. 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 the Mardi Gras festival and proposed to . 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. In THE BUMP AND GRIND MURDERS (1964) Mavis works 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." Yates's best- known hero is Al Wheeler, a homicide lieutenant, who 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.

Characters: Mavis Seidlitz, a private eye; Rick Holman (see below), a Hollywood PI; Randy Roberts, a San Francisco lawyer; Larry Baker, a Hollywood screenwriter and his drunk partner Boris Slivka. Al Wheeler is a homicide lieutenant with the sheriff's department in the fictional Pine Country, California. - For further reading: Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. by John M. Reilly (1985); Ready when you are, C.B.! : the autobiography of Alan Yates alias Carter Brown.

Character map - other PIs working in Hollywood, Los Angeles: Don Pendleton's Joe Copp, Timothy Harris's Thomas Kyd, Willis Toadhunter Ballard's Bill Lennox, Stuart M. Kaminsky's Toby Peters, Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott, Robert Leslie Bellem's Dan Turner, Robert Cambell's Whistler.

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