Carter Brown Robert Drewe column … Recent column in The West Australian It’s writers’ festival season once more and in cities and country towns around the nation our authors are being interrogated on important literary matters by pleasant, earnest people rugged up in berets and corduroy. My favourite audience questions are, “What sort of computer do you use?” and “Is there a quid in writing novels?” and “Where can I get a copy of your book?” (Try a bookshop.) Then there are those questions requiring insights that not even sci-fi and fantasy writers possess: “Will my husband like your book?” and “Have I heard of you?” followed by, “Should I have heard of you?” Perhaps festival audiences can all be summed up in a particular query asked of me two years ago: “My book club has been studying the works of the wonderful Jane Austen, and it seems to me that in the history of world literature there has never been a writer who understood the human condition as exquisitely and sensitively as Jane Austen. “I recently borrowed from the library your book on Perth serial killers and I wondered if it concerned you that your writing and subject matter in no way resemble the work of Jane Austen. Do you intend to rectify this?” The Jane Austen question was asked by a woman. Interestingly, the question about novelists’ earnings is always asked by a man. Sometimes he adds thoughtfully, “Looks like a good lurk, best-seller writer. I’ve been thinking of giving it a go myself.” (Excellent, just as I’m considering becoming a nuclear physicist or test pilot.) OK, authors’ earnings. Not always what you imagine. Forget James Patterson, Stephen King and J.K Rowling. Forget that woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey. (Forgotten her name? Yes, me too.) The unsung best-selling author here and internationally was a Sydney writer named Alan Yates, who wrote 322 books from the early 1950s to the early 80s under the name Carter Brown. The huge international success of the Carter Brown Mysteries saw 120 million books of his in print, second only to the Bible in the number of language translations. Carter Brown: the name conjures up adolescent readers and images of his covers -- voluptuous near-naked women and spicy faux-American titles: A Bullet For My Baby; Shroud For My Sugar; Murder is My Mistress; Blackmail for a Brunette; The Wench Is Wicked; Swan Song For A Siren; Blonde, Beautiful – and Blam!; and The Hoodlum Was A Honey. Born in London in 1923, Yates immigrated to Sydney when he was 25 and worked as a film technician, salesman and Qantas PR man before taking up pulp fiction. A writing whirlwind, he also penned westerns under the pseudonym “Todd Conway”; romances as “Caroline Farr” and science fiction under the name “Paul Valdez”. As well as the 322 Carter Browns, he wrote books under his own name, and as “Dennis Sinclair” and “Sinclair MacKellar”. His books were originally published by Horwitz Publications in Australia, who then on-sold overseas rights to Signet in the US. At the height of his popularity a rumour spread that Yates was one of President Kennedy’s favourite authors – which helped Carter Brown’s sales in the American market. All those books: he must have been rich? No. As his biographer, Toni Johnson-Woods, points out in The Promiscuous Carter Brown, in 1951 he’d signed a 30-year contract with Horwitz which required him to produce three novels each month (my gob-smacked emphasis), for which he received a guaranteed weekly payment of 30 pounds ($60). In 1951 it was twice his Qantas salary, but hardly a fortune. As Johnson-Woods says, “In 1955 Yates wrote 20 books, the following year 25. He was writing a new novel every fortnight. He had the ability to write 40,000 words overnight.” Despite his huge output, a 1963 profile in Pix magazine revealed that on “the third night without sleep, he approached writing with the reluctance of a long-distance swimmer shivering on the brink of a cold, grey English Channel.” In its obituary for Yates in 1985 (he died relatively young, of a heart attack), the New York Times noted that he’d written 30 detective novels with American backgrounds before ever setting foot there. A quiet man, who lived in St Ives on Sydney’s sedate North Shore, he said he chose American settings because Australians preferred them.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 01:22:13 +0000
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