The Curious Case of Carter Brown

Carter Brown books are the penultimate in bad tawdry sleaze/crime/sex novels, and guilty pleasures.

They”re so awful that they are good fun reads.

Carter Brown was the pen name for British-born Australian pukp writer Alan G. Yates, who had an extended deal with Horowitz publications for one 42,000 word novel a month plus two novelettes for periodicals like Long Story.

All were hardboiled sexual fiction featuring one of three heroes: L.A. County sheriff detective Al Wheeler, L.A. private eye Rick Holman, or LAPD cop Danny Boyd.  neither three were much different from the other: they all had the same first-person voice and the same sexual libido, meeting the same blondes, hoods, and crooks.

His early books have a disclaimer at the end: “Written on an IBM Selectric.”  Electric typewriters were like high end laptops in those days.

What is hilarious about the books is that Yates/Brown had no idea what L.A and Hollywood was like, other than a few trips there, he didn’t live there;  writing from Sydney, AU, he just picked the locale because it was (and is) a popular setting for detective fiction.

It seems that Yates may have been ripped off by his publisher, which paid him about $1200/month U.S.  for his output and licensed his books in America to Signet for $1500 each, not mention in Europe and elsewhere…it was doubtful Yates saw a percentage of these foreign sales, or royalties on the “50,000,000 Carter Brown books sold!”