Carter Brown

Carter Brown or Alan Geoffrey Yates, Finland 1964.

Carter Brown (born August 1, 1923 in London , England under the name Alan Geoffrey Yates , † May 5, 1985 in Sydney , Australia ) was one of the most successful Australian crime writers of the 20th century. Today he is largely unknown. Between 1953 and 1981 he wrote about 200 novels.

Life

Alan Geoffrey Yates was born on August 1, 1923 in London. After basic training, he studied in Essex and entered the Royal Navy in 1942 . He worked his way up to lieutenant and then resigned from the military a year after the end of the war, in 1946. Looking for a job, he applied to "British Acoustic Films", a subsidiary of Gaumont ( Gaumont-British-Films ), where he was employed for two years and worked as a sound engineer. He later wrote in his autobiography that he hated this work, especially since he was technically inept.

In 1948 Yates moved to Sydney, Australia, where he was naturalized directly. He worked there for the airline Qantas- Empire-Airways as a businessman and PR consultant and as an editor for the company's own advertising newspaper and an employee magazine. On the side he started writing short stories. After numerous rejections, he managed to gain a foothold in the magazine novel scene, initially with western novels for "Invincible Press". Inspired by the success of Mickey Spillane's novels , he and his new employer, Horwitz-Verlag, decided to try this type of crime thriller. These short novels initially appeared under the name Peter Carter Brown and caused a sensation, not least because of their title pictures, which were daring for the time. After 1953, Yates worked as a freelance writer. Since the Carter Brown Mysteries were selling very well, Horwitz strove to expand the market. The plants, which were initially only designed for the Australian market, found their way to the USA and Europe , where a. in France by Gallimard and in Germany by the publisher Kurt Desch (series “Midnight Books”), then Ullstein and later Heyne . In Europe it reached millions of copies. In the USA, well-known artists such as Robert McGinnis (film poster for the James Bond films) were responsible for the design of his works .

Yates married Australian Denise Sinclair Mackellar and had a daughter and three sons with her. He died of a heart attack in Sydney in 1985.

The literary work

Initially, Yates wrote short crime, western and horror stories under his pseudonym Tex Conrad , which were published in Thrills Incorporated magazine or appeared as dime books . However, after those brief beginnings, he began to focus more on crime stories. His crime novels have been very successful, so Yates and his family can afford expensive homes (New York, Hong Kong, London, Sydney) and costly travel.

Yates wrote most of his works under the name Carter Brown from 1953 to 1981. First the pseudonym was "Peter Carter Brown", which was gradually shortened to "Carter Brown" in the course of the 1950s. He also wrote romantic thrillers for women (pseudonym: "Caroline Farr"). The Australian Brown expert Toni Johnson-Woods assumes that Yates wrote about 200 novels in all. Johnson-Woods has found that a few novels under the name Carter Brown were written by a CJ MacKenzie rather than Yates.

Yates published an agent novel under the name "Dennis Sinclair". In 1958 he only published a novel under his own name: The Cold Dark Hours .

In the late 1960s, Yates' novels became much more revealing to suit contemporary tastes, which annoyed some critics. New editions of older Carter Brown novels were updated - probably by someone else's hand - and, above all, enriched with sex scenes. The macho attitude of the Brownian heroes, presented with a twinkle in their eye, soon no longer fit the time. Yates / Brown's last novels were published in English in the early 1980s. His widow, Denise Yates, tried unsuccessfully to get some of her husband's novels reprinted in the 1990s. Yates' publishing house - Horwitz, Australia - declined a new edition on the grounds that the books were completely out of date and would no longer find an audience today.

In 1983 Yates published his memoirs, Ready When You Are, CB

Literary style

Yates' novels are in the tradition of the classic private detective novels à la Raymond Chandler , but are clearly based on the works of Mickey Spillane and above all Robert Leslie Bellem, the most famous author of harmless-erotic trash detective stories in the USA. Many works are characterized by the ambition to "entertain the reader in all areas" (quoted by Yates) - so "Sex & Crime" were discussed more openly and more strongly. Yates followed the example of Ian Fleming , who used the same motto for his James Bond novels. Special features of his books are quick and quick-witted sayings ("wisecracks") of his heroes and often downright slapstick-like scenes. In addition to their investigative work, Yates' heroes are mainly occupied with stalking beautiful young women.

With a few exceptions, his novels are not set in his adopted country of Australia, but in a "cardboard America" (according to one critic) and were given a slang that he had acquired through books and films. Yates never undertook research trips, which some experts chalked up against him: he wrote a "sometimes tinny version of US slang" (according to the Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers ).

A particular habit of Yates' was to twist the names of other short stories and novels so that the insider could still understand his allusions. An example of this is Murder Is My Mistress (1954), the title of which is strongly reminiscent of Raymond Chandler's Trouble Is My Business (1950). The German titles of his books were in some cases also clearly striving to be witty originality: "In the Kille-Kille Cellar", "Ackerbau und Fornication", "Grober Nfug mit Blondinen" etc.

Yates' most important fictional heroes: Lieutenant Al Wheeler (investigated in the fictional town of Pine City), Hollywood detective Rick Holman, New York philanderer / detective Danny Boyd, who is constantly trying to put his "irresistible" profile into perspective, the screenwriters and involuntary detectives Boris Slivka and Larry Baker - and the curvy detective Mavis Seidlitz. All of them had a relatively long life and appeared as early as the 1950s.

Publications (selection)

1953 Venus Unarmed (first work)

1953 The Lady Is Chased

1953 The Black Widow Weeps

1953 Penthouse Passout

1953 Strip Without Tease

1954 Murder - Paris Fashion

1954 Nememis Wore nylons

1954 Maid For Murder

1954 Murder Is My Mistress

1955 Shamus, Your Slip Is Showing

1955 Cutie Cashed His Chips

1955 The Blonde (German: Assassination attempt on Georgia . Desch, Munich and others 1959)

1955 Kiss Me Deadly

1955 Lipstick Larceny

1956 Blonde, Beautiful, And - Blam!

1956 Strictly For Felony

1956 Booty For A Babe

1956 Blonde Verdict (German: Poison and Money . Desch, Munich et al. 1964)

1957 Cutie Wins A Corpse

1957 Bella Donna Was Poison

1958 So Lovely She Lies

1958 Goddess Gone Bad

1958 Sinfully Yours

1961 The Stripper (German: A case for Al Wheeler . Desch, Munich et al. 1964)

1961 The Tigress (German: Die Tigerin . Desch, Munich et al. 1963)

1961 The Exotic (German: danger for Al Wheeler . Desch, Munich et al. 1963)

1962 The Ice-Cold Nude (German: cold like a diamond . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. A. 1965)

1962 Walk softly, witch (German: witch on quiet feet . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. A. 1965)

1963 The Sinners

1963 The Jade-Eyed Jinx (also as: The jade-eyed Jungle ; German: It happened in Hollywood . Desch, Munich 1965)

1964 The Velvet Vixen (also as: The Vixen ; German: Al Wheeler und die Füchsin . Heyne, Munich 1978)

1966 Mansion Of Evil

1966 Mansion Of Peril

1968 The Deep Cold Green

1969 The Up-Tught Blonde

1970 The Son Of The Beast (German: Hell with full board . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. A. 1971)

1971 The Sex Clinic (German: Die Sexklinik . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. Et al. 1972)

1971 WHORE (German: Al Wheeler und die Teufelsbrut . Desch, Munich and others 1972)

1972 The Pornbroker (German: love in front of the camera . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. A. 1973)

1972 The Seven Sirens (German: Island of the Seven Sirens . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. A. 1972)

1975 Sex Trap (German: Treacherous Lips . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. And a. 1976)

1978 Coriolanus, The Chariot!

1979 Rip-Off (also as: The Rip-Off ; German: Nepp für Narren . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. Et al. 1979)

1979 The Spanking Girls (also as: Spanking Girls ; German: Al Wheeler and the millionaire's daughter . Heyne, Munich 1980)

1981 The Wicked Widow

Film adaptations

1960: Blond charm and weird shadows ( Touchez-pas aux blondes ) - based on the novel The Body
1963: Lots of corpses in Las Vegas ( Blague dans le coin )

honors and awards

In 1997 he was posthumously honored with the Ned Kelly Award , the Australian crime crime prize.

Trivia

In 1982 the Sydney Theater Company played a musical based on a Carter Brown novel: The Stripper with Terence Donovan as Lt. Al Wheeler. Richard O'Brien , creator of the Rocky Horror Show, was responsible for this work .

Web links

Literature by and about Carter Brown in the catalog of the German National Library

personal data
SURNAME	Brown, Carter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Alan Geoffrey Yates
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Australian crime writer
DATE OF BIRTH	August 1, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH	London , England
DATE OF DEATH	May 5th 1985
Place of death	Sydney , Australia