Carter Brown’s mock American prose read a bit like the conclusion of a game of “telephone,” in which the person at the end of the line can repeat the gist of the story but gets a lot of the words wrong. His own sensibility dictated an imitation not so much of the realistic hard-boiled strain of Dashiell hammett and Raymond chandler but of the more hyperbolic and tongue-in-cheek hard-boiled pros like Carrol John daly and Robert Leslie bellem, and perhaps the newly launched Shell Scott series of zany hard-boiled mysteries by Richard Prather. Like Chase and Cheyney and others before him, Yates’s knowledge of America and the sort of underworld milieu and jargon he imitated came strictly from reading the earlier works in the genre. In early years he used the name of Peter Carter Brown. From the early ’50s, however, he began to concentrate almost exclusively on his American-style detective stories.
In the beginning he wrote anything- crime, horror stories, and westerns under the pen name of Tex Conrad. He worked as a traveling salesman before starting to sell pulp fiction stories to Australian periodicals. In the 1950s, the Australians produced a number of their own homegrown masters of American-style crime fiction, and none was more successful or prolific than Alan Geoffrey Yates, better known by his durable pen name of Carter Brown.īorn in England, Yates immigrated to Australia after World War II and service in the Royal Navy.
By the 1930s the style had been adopted by English hard-boiled imitators like James Hadley chase and Peter cheyney, and in the 1940s it was given a Gallic transfer by such French writers as Leo Malet (b. The original stories and novels were distributed in other countries with great success and certain foreign writers began to attempt to copy the form. The hard-boiled detective story had slowly, steadily made its way around the world in the years following its invention in America in the early 1920s.
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