April's Affections and Intrigues: Love and Mystery Bloom
Carter Brown
Carter Brown (1923-1985) - Pseudonym for Allan Geoffrey
Yates, who also wrote as Caroline Farr, Tom Conway and Paul
Valdez
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 he 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.
"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)
Alan Geoffrey Yates was born 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, but
when Carter Brown series was picked up by the New American
Library, he found readers also in the United States. There
his book covers were often illustrated by Barye Phillips
and Robert McGinnis. In France Gallimard started to publish
Carter Brown's works in 1959 in Série Noire (number 477),
which also published such writers as James Hadley Chase,
Peter Cheyney, Horace McCoy, Jonathan Latimer, Dashiell
Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. In Australia
the Brown books were published by Horwitz, one of Sydney's
leading paperback houses. - Yates was married with Denise
Sinclair Mackellar; they had one daughter and three sons.
Yates died on May 5, 1985.
In the beginning Yates wrote crime, horror stories, and
westerns under the pen name of Tex Conrad. For the magazine
Thrills Incorporated he cowrote around 1950 some tales with
G.C. Bleek, but his major work in science fiction was
CORIOLANUS, THE CHARIOT! (1978), a story about illusions,
paranoia, and a toxic game. Soon Yates started to
concentrate on crime fiction, producing a flood of books:
in 1953 appeared 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. In 1958 he published also a novel under
his own name, THE COLD DARK HOURS, and in 1966 appeared the
first novels written as Caroline Farr. Like 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 films. However, European readers
enjoyed his hard-boiled style and local coloring to the
full, without any doubts, and American readers did not pay
much attention to his "sometimes tin-eared version of U.S.
speech patterns and slang" (Lee Server in Encyclopedia of
Pulp Fiction Writers, 2002). Sometimes 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 Nakes 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).
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 story 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 his sex scenes were
comparatively mild, but then they started to be more
explicit. 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. One mystery inspired in the 1980s a stage
musical called The Stripper, staged by the Sydney Theatre
Company.
A typical Carter Brown story did not take itself too
seriously - it was a mixture of sex, action, and humor.
Yates's female hero was the curvaceous private detective
Mavis Seidlitz, whose feminine weapons are more developed
than her mental capacities. Mavis works with Johnny Rio,
who believes that thinking is his department and do 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 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.
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." 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 Country, 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.