Carter Brown

Carter Brown was the literary pseudonym of Alan Geoffrey Yates (1 August 1923 – 5 May 1985), an English-born Australian writer of detective fiction.

He was born on 1 August 1923 at Ilford, Essex, England, the only child of Harry Thomas Yates a railway clerk, and his wife Linda Annie, née Willingale.

Alan worked for British Acoustic Films where he converted films from 35mm to 16mm.

Enlisting in the Royal Navy in September 1942, he served aboard Landing Craft Support (Large) 504 on operations that included the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944.

After he was commissioned in February 1945, he spent eighteen months in the light cruiser, HMS Euryalus, in the East Indies Fleet and British Pacific Fleet where he first visited Australia.

On leave in Sydney in 1945 he had met 18-year-old Denise Sinclair MacKellar.

They married on 3 June 1946 at St Chad’s Church of England, Cremorne, New South Wales.

In England he went back to British Acoustic Films as a sound cameraman, a job he found unrewarding.

He wrote some magazine articles and radio scripts that were rejected.

He was demobilised as a sub-lieutenant in England in January 1947.

The couple returned to Australia in 1948.

After working as a salesman, wine company clerk and newsagent supplier, Yates joined Qantas Empire Airways Ltd. as a publicity writer where he produced their monthly flight magazine as well as the staff journal.

In his spare time he wrote a western, which was accepted by Invincible Press, where he was paid £20, or £1 per 1000 words.

Soon he was also writing for Horwitz Publications where he authored horror, science-fiction and detective stories, published under the pen names of ‘Paul Valdez’ and ‘Tod Conway’.

In the mid-1950s Yates was turning out more than twenty books a year; they were also published in England and Finland.

The extraordinary early success of Carter Brown in the 1950s meant that Yates was contracted to produce one short novel and two long novels each month.

In reality, Yates was truly prolific with 322 published Carter Brown novels, including multiple series variously featuring protagonists Mike Farrell, Andy Kane, Mavis Seidlitz, Lt. Al Wheeler, Rick Holman, Danny Boyd, Larry Baker, Zelda Roxanne, et al.

Between 1954 and 1984 Yates published 215 ‘Carter Brown’ novels and some 75 novella-length stories.

His publisher encouraged him to specialise on crime genre novellas and then full-length detective novels, the first of which was Murder is My Mistress (1954).

These were published under the pseudonyms of ‘Peter Carter Brown’ and ‘Peter Carter-Brown’.

Horwitz lured him to become a full-time writer, offering him a contract that guaranteed a weekly income of £30 against royalties.

In 1958 the New American Library began to publish his novels (beginning with The Body) under the Signet label and with the author listed as Carter Brown, a name judged most suitable for the American market.

Eventually his books were translated into fourteen languages, including German and Japanese.

Yates soon became a literary phenomenon.

He wrote westerns under the pseudonym Todd Conway, and science fiction under Paul Valdez.

He even found the time to write books under various versions of his own name as well as other pseudonyms, Dennis Sinclair and Sinclair MacKellar.

But it was his pseudonym Peter Carter Brown then later, Carter Brown ('Peter' was dropped for the US market) who was to become the international best-selling pulp fiction author.

Yet despite the enormity of his output, a 1963 profile in Pix magazine revealed he approached deadlines 'with the reluctance of a long-distance swimmer shivering on the brink of a cold, grey English Channel.

In the manic depressive moments of the third night without sleep – when the deadline is long past and the mental block has set solid as concrete, the writer inevitably descends into self-analysis.

He knows, of course, that it will be no more help than the last Dexedrine tablet but still clings to the naïve hope that, somehow, sometime, he will find a way of avoiding the recurrence of his present hopeless situation.’

His books, originally published by Horwitz and Signet, were set in the United States and published throughout the anglophone world.

In the early 1980s, Yates and Richard O'Brien of The Rocky Horror Show fame wrote a musical of The Stripper, described in classic Carter Brown terminology as 'the girl who says it all from the neck down'.

In its obituary for Yates in 1985, The New York Times noted that he had written "some 30 detective novels with American backgrounds before ever having visited the United States ... He said he chose American settings because Australians preferred them."

A rumour spread at the height of his popularity that Yates was one of John F. Kennedy's favourite authors – a rumour which helped propel his sales even further in the North American market.

The novels were also popular in Europe where they were translated into French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Finnish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch.

In Asia, some of the novels were translated into Thai and Japanese.

Carter Brown's huge international success saw reportedly 120 million books in print, second only to The Bible in terms of the number of languages into which they were translated.

The success of the books also spawned a comic book series, the 'Carter Brown Murder Mystery Hour' on radio, three French films, a Japanese TV series, and a French literary award for 'The most whiskies drunk in a single novel'.

Yates died of a heart attack in 1985 in Sydney.

In 1997, he was posthumously awarded a Ned Kelly, Australia's leading literary award for crime writing, for his lifelong contribution to the art.