Thanks to everybody that responded to my questions about
Australian hardboiled. Carter Brown's THE BODY is my
first.
Carter Brown is a pseudonym for the prolific Australian crime
writer Alan Yates, who wrote more than 150 novels between
1953 and 1968. Five years after he started writing, over 25
million Carter Brown books were in print. Born in 1923, he
worked in sales and public relation in Australia until he
turned to writing full-time in 1953. From the very beginning
he was incredibly productive. Starting with VENUS UNARMED
(1953), he published an astonishing 8 novels in his first
year. He employed a number of series protagonists. Al
Wheeler, a homicide detective for a small southern California
town, is his most popular hero. He appears for the first time
in THE WENCH IS WICKED (1955). Mavis Seidliz, a private
detective, was his most popular female protagonist. In 1959
Gallimard published him in the famous French Serie Noire
series. Yates was married to Denise Mackellar and they had
one daughter and three sons. In 1966 he began writing under
the name Caroline Farr. He wrote an autobiography in 1983 and
died on May 5, 1985.
In THE BODY (1958) Al Wheeler is on loan to the sheriff's
department. An investigation into the murder of two women
with identical snake tatoos on their arms leads to a
prostitution ring led by a mysterious Snake Lannigan, and Al
endures an unhappy boss and an unwilling assistant in his
effort to uncover the truth. The book follows a typical Brown
formula set in the States, involving humorous quips, a host
of gorgeous women, several murders, and a lightheated
atmosphere that glosses over violence. Although sex is often
alluded to in THE BODY, all the action in that arena occurs
off-stage. Explicit sex did not creep into his works until
the 1970s.
Plot has always been king in hardboiled literature. The crime
and the clues are intricately woven together, with the truth
slowly revealed through the eyes of a brilliant sleuth. A
bibliography of selected works reveals that Yates produced at
least twenty other novels in 1958, and the obviously
commercial pace is adversely reflected in THE BODY. The
book's plot is weak, unconvincing, and disjointed. The
reasoning Wheeler uses for his solution of the crime is
arbitrary and questionable, and Wheeler's personality jumps
from a lighthearted Nick and Nora approach, gleaned from
Hammett's THE THIN MAN, to the cold-blooded vengeance of
Spillane's Mike Hammer.
In spite of these faults, Carter Brown's writing has an
unmistakable charm, and I found myself to be a willing
audience. I think that if Brown had slowed his pace and put
more effort into quality instead of quantity, he could have
written on par with J.D. MacDonald.
miker
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