Another Look: “The Lady Is Transparent”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.

The Lady Is Transparent, by “Carter Brown,” aka Alan Geoffrey Yates. Being offered this week are not just two paperback versions of this slender ghostbusting yarn, but four. On the left above is the 1962 Horwitz edition from Australia; on the right is the 1962 Signet edition with a cover illustration by Robert McGinnis.



On the left below is the 1967 Horwitz edition, while on the right is Signet’s 1968 version, again with McGinnis cover art.

The Lesser Look: Welcome to Summer!

Part of a month-long celebration of Ron Lesser’s artistic legacy.



The Ever-Loving Blues (previously published as Death of a Doll), by “Carter Brown,” otherwise known as Alan Geoffrey Yates (Signet, 1969). This is one of at least 30 books starring demonstrably rugged New York City private eye Danny Boyd.

To see more summer-related paperbacks, click here.

The Lesser Look: “Tomorrow Is Murder”

Part of a month-long celebration of Ron Lesser’s artistic legacy.



Tomorrow Is Murder, by “Carter Brown,” aka Alan Geoffrey Yates (Signet, 1968). This is one of Brown’s dozen novels starring “ravishingly beautiful” but slightly ditzy gumshoe Mavis Seidlitz.

The Lesser Look: “Target for Their Dark Desire”

Part of a month-long celebration of Ron Lesser’s artistic legacy.



Target for Their Dark Desire, by “Carter Brown,” aka Alan Geoffrey Yates (Signet, 1966). This is one of Brown’s many novels starring Al Wheeler, a sheriff’s homicide investigator who operates in fictional Pine County, California, near Los Angeles.

Get Carter

More than five years ago, in the early days of this blog, I wrote a post about the phenomenally productive Carter Brown (aka Alan Geoffrey Yates), who during his three-decades-long career penned hundreds of paperback crime and detective novels, most of which were fronted by paintings of women in various stages of undress. That has since become one of Killer Covers’ 10 most-visited posts.

When I originally assembled the piece, I stocked it with just 15 examples Carter Brown cover art, noting that those were “just a few of my favorites.” Well, since that time I have added numerous scans to my Carter Brown computer file, enough that I’ve decided to beef up my original online gallery of that author’s work. The revised post--which you will find by clicking here--boasts 71 paperback fronts, including the one embedded above from the 1961 Signet edition of The Tigress, with a cover illustration by Ron Lesser.

I hope you enjoy the revamped Carter Brown post. Please let me know if you find any of your own favorites among the bunch.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall ...

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on any of these images to open up an enlargement.



By this point, I’ve spent so many pleasant hours studying the covers of vintage paperback novels, that a buzzer goes off in my brain whenever I spot one that resembles another. However, the front of Hank Janson’s It’s Bedtime, Baby! (Gold Star, 1964) had been filed away on my computer for some while before I realized what it reminded me of. That goodness I finally got it!

The painter responsible for this most captivating façade of It’s Bedtime, Baby! was Harry Barton (1908-2001), a Seattle, Washington-born artist who--like Rudy Nappi, Sam Cherry, Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka, and Rafael DeSoto--attended the Art Students League of New York. With the help of those last three individuals, Barton received the training and contacts he needed to break into the worlds of freelance magazine illustration and book-cover creation. He went on to paint covers for novels by Ellery Queen, James Hadley Chase, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, and other crime-fictionists, as well as the fronts for soft-core publishers such as Monarch and Midwood. Later, he specialized in fine-art paintings of the Old West.

It’s Bedtime, Baby! was one of more than a dozen Janson novels published over the years by Gold Star, though by the time it hit the newsstands in ’64, the Brit who had for so long been writing under the Janson pseudonym--Stephen Daniel Frances--had turned the reins of that “pseudo-American” thriller series over to other scribblers. Writing not long ago in his blog, Dispatches from the Last Outlaw, author Thomas McNulty opined:

The Hank Janson paperbacks are part of that forever distant past that so many of us recall with fondness. Those were the days when a spinning rack of paperbacks or comic books offered up treasures beyond comprehension. It was the era of five-and-dime stores and Route 66 and the Sinclair green dinosaur outside of gas stations. Hank Janson originated in England. The set-up being he’s a Chicago reporter and these books are his first-person account of his adventures. There are always beautiful women, usually in dire straits, and Janson, being a man that knows what he likes, decides to get involved. He’s in like Flynn, in the grandest of male traditions, and as hard-boiled as an egg but a lot tougher. In It’s Bedtime, Baby! eleven college women get caught up in a weird sorority called The Virgin Club, and Janson discovers one of these gals is behind a string of brutal kidnappings. In order to unravel the mystery, Janson needs to get close to these ladies, real close. Hot and saucy action ensues, along with murder, punctuated by droll he-man dialogue. It’s fun to read, and the pages flip past rather quickly.

Now shift your attention to the cover above and on the right, taken from the 1962 Signet edition of Murder Wears a Mantilla, by Carter Brown (aka Alan G. Yates). It’s immediately recognizable as the work of Robert McGinnis, whose artistry I have showcased many times on this page. As with the fetching blonde in Barton’s cover, the raven-tressed lovely in McGinnis’ painting is nude, playing with her hair, and seated before a mirror (only McGinnis’ subject is actually looking at herself). In keeping with the novel’s title, she’s wearing a mantilla--a lace veil worn by women in Spain and Central America.

Murder Wears a Mantilla, first published in 1957, was the fourth novel in Yates/Brown’s series starring Mavis Seidlitz, the “ravishingly beautiful” Los Angeles private eye “who plays hard and fast with men … money … and murder.” The Nick Carter & Carter Brown blog offers this brief about the story told between its covers:

Mavis Seidlitz … is the dizziest blonde who ever ended up in the Tunnel of Love after buying tickets for the Big Dipper. When she is not trying to fix her clothing, either a brazier, stockings, or chemise, she is a partner in Rio Investigations. As the story goes, Mavis is South of the border on vacation. She meets one bull fighter who she thinks is the dreamiest. The next bullfighter has a knife stuck in his back. So she starts investigating up until things get out of hand. The Black Death, 40 million pesos, The Golden Inca, people with guns. So she sends a cable to her boss, Johnny Rio. HELP.

Mavis Seidlitz (what a moniker!) wasn’t the brightest bulb on the streets of L.A. As chemist-turned-book-art collector Art Scott recalls, she was pretty much a “burlesque caricature with a semi-plausible character voice.” It’s been said as well that her “pulchritudinous assets far outweigh[ed] her mental equipment.” Yet from her first appearance, in Honey, Here’s Your Hearse (1955), until her last, in And the Undead Sing (1974), Mavis somehow managed to solve crimes and not lose her life with the same casualness that she lost her clothes. “At least once in each book,” notes Kathleen Gregory Klein in The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (1995), “she inhales too deeply and breaks a bra strap with predictable results. … Her body and her tight clothes, peekaboo blouses, or see-through nighties fill her narration and the [male readers’] imaginations.”

Although this is supposed to be only a “two-fer” post, I can’t help offering a bonus of sorts, for in the course of my research earlier today I ran across a third beautiful cover that’s very much in keeping with those previous two. So on the left, I present the front from the 1961 Crest paperback edition of False Scent, New Zealand wordsmith Ngaio Marsh’s 21st novel featuring her familiar “gentleman detective,” Roderick Alleyn. Again, the illustration comes from Robert McGinnis. And once more it presents a woman ensconced comfortably before a mirror, fussing with her hair. In this case, though, the shadow of a threatening hand reaches into the image from the left. In a cover line, Erle Stanley Gardner promised that this novel was “a superb chiller.” Maybe so, but it’s the cover art that really sells this edition of False Scent for me.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Frozen Assets

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



Because I live way out here in more temperate Seattle, I’m missing all the snowstorm woes currently being inflicted upon New England. But that doesn’t mean the cold has not been on my mind. In fact, my wife and I spent a good chunk of last night watching “Blizzard 2015” TV coverage, and I woke this morning with the desire to devote this week’s Two-fer Tuesday installment (the first since early December--my apologies) to the chillier side of mystery fiction.

Above and on the left, you’ll find the 1957 Signet New American Library paperback edition of The Flesh Was Cold (a book originally published in 1950 as The Angels Fell). This “medium-boiled detective thriller” was the 11th novel by Bruno Fischer (1908-1992), a Berlin-born sports reporter turned pulp-fictionist, who in the late 1930s ran as a Socialist candidate for the New York state senate. And though The Flesh Was Cold was not technically an entry in Fischer’s post-World War II series about New York City private investigator Ben Helm (who apparently doesn’t make a showing until the novel’s second half), it is often lumped in among those.

Credit for the illustration fronting this edition of The Flesh Is Cold belongs to the renowned Robert Maguire.

Now please direct your attention to the paperback façade opposite Maguire’s. I hadn’t intended to revisit the bulging portfolio of Robert McGinnis, after my month-long celebration of his creativity last October. However, this front from the 1962 Signet paperback issue of Carter Brown’s The Ice-Cold Nude, featuring series P.I. Danny Boyd, provides excellent proof of McGinnis’ many talents as a painter, not to mention his fondness for the female form. The painter later created another, different cover for the 1969 Signet edition of The Ice-Cold Nude, which you can enjoy here.

Brown Out

Novelist Carter Brown died 25 years ago this week--which was a pretty slick trick, since he had never actually existed. At least not as a separate corporeal entity.

The author’s real name was Alan Geoffrey Yates, and he was born in London, England, on August 1, 1923. Yates served with the Royal Navy during the Second World War, and after the fighting and dying was done, he signed on as a sound recordist at a British film company for two years before moving to Australia in 1948. In Sydney, he worked as a public relations staffer and salesman for what was then known as Qantas Empire Airways, but also tried composing short stories for magazines such as Thrills Incorporated, and novel-length “scientific thrillers” for Horwitz Publications, a local book publisher (founded in 1920, and evidently still in business). His early literary efforts were intended for Australian readers. But Yates’ career trajectory and audience changed dramatically in 1951.

Toni Johnson-Woods, the author of Pulp: A Collector’s Book of Australian Pulp Fiction Covers (2004), tells of Yates’ transformation in an article available on the Web:

The persona ‘Carter Brown’ started modestly enough in the Sydney offices of Horwitz Publications in 1951. The company published locally written fiction, specifically comics and soft-covered genre novels--in common parlance, ‘pulp fiction.’ In 1939 the Australian government had established tariffs on American imports that effectively banned American pulps, and local publishers and writers stepped in to fill the fiction void. This produced Australia’s richest publishing decades, 1939-1959; when the prohibitions were lifted in 1959, the local industry died overnight. In its heyday, Horwitz Publications printed up to forty-eight comics and around twenty-four fiction titles--with print-runs of up to 250,000--each month. After the phenomenal successes of the pulp fiction writers James Hadley Chase and Mickey Spillane in the United States, the editorial team at Horwitz decided to exploit Australian readers’ appetite for faux American ‘gangster’ fiction and approached Alan Geoffrey Yates ... [Yates] was asked if he would be interested in writing a mystery series as ‘Peter Carter Brown’; he signed a thirty-year contract which required him to produce two novelettes and one full-length novel a month, and for which he was to receive a guaranteed weekly advance of 30 [pounds sterling].

In September 1951 The Lady Is Murder, by Peter Carter Brown, appeared in Australia; seven years and millions of copies later, Horwitz Publications sold the overseas rights to reprint Carter Brown novels to an American publisher, Signet. Over a period of thirty years, from the early fifties to the early eighties, Yates wrote approximately three hundred Carter Brown novels. In the process, he became Australia’s best-selling novelist: Signet claimed international sales of eighty million copies, and the series was translated into more than a dozen languages.

Three hundred books? That’s approaching Georges Simenon’s phenomenal output. It’s no wonder, then, that although Yates enjoyed his increase in pay (£30 was almost double his Qantas salary), he found his writing pace for Horwitz rather grueling. Just looking at the lists of works he churned out in 1951-1956, 1957-1963, and 1964-1985 might make a normal wordsmith dive to join the dust bunnies under his bed. As Johnson-Woods explains in another essay, this one available on the Mystery*File site:

In 1955 Yates wrote 20 books, the following year 25 appeared--like [fellow Aussie pulp fiction writer Gordon Clive] Bleeck he was writing a new novel every fortnight. In 1960 Lyall Moore of Horwitz calculated that Yates had published about eight million words: “but to get there he has probably written twice the number.” Given Yates’ ability to write 40,000 words overnight, Horwitz were confident when they signed a contract with Signet for Yates to produce one new novel per month. He had been writing that for the past several years.

Who didn’t see that no one could plot, write, and edit one 127-page novel a month? Especially when the writer lives in Sydney, has to submit his mss [manuscript] to local editors (at Horwitz), who then edit and send [it] off to Signet. Signet editors then revised the mss and sent [it] back to Horwitz for approval; Horwitz sent the material back to Yates. It was a pretty straightforward but time-consuming [arrangement]. Often Yates’ material did not receive his approval, naturally. Soon Yates was behind and more than a little peeved. Signet had made “a new novel a month” the cornerstone of their Carter Brown publicity. The Signet archives are filled with correspondence that reflects the constant treadmill of late mss and attempts to fill the voids.

As a result of this regimen, the Carter Brown books were pretty uneven in quality. At their best, they could be likened to novels produced by such contemporaries as Richard S. Prather, Frank Kane, Harold Q. Masur, and Robert Leslie Bellem. Yet William L. DeAndrea, in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, characterizes them as “fun and forgettable.” A number of the Carter tales were standalones; but Yates also served up several continuing leads, among them Hollywood private investigator Rick Holman (“savior of blackmailed film starlets”), New York-based detective Danny Boyd, hard-drinking Southern California homicide cop Al Wheeler, and “torrid blonde private eye” Mavis Seidlitz. These revolving protagonists helped to differentiate the books from one another; the plots themselves might have worked fine with any of Yates’ sleuths at the helm.

Even at the height of their popularity, recalls novelist James Reasoner, the Brown books “didn’t get much respect.” (This, despite the fact that one of Yates’ editors at Signet was the now-famous litterateur, E.L. Doctorow.) That lack of acclaim hardly mattered, however. The books “just sold and sold and sold some more,” Reasoner notes. At various stages, Signet claimed to have 20 million, 40 million, and 50 million Carter Brown books in print. During the 1960s, every drug store, bookstore, and newsstand seemed to have been invaded by slim paperbacks with the byline “Carter Brown” angled across their tops. And it’s said that Brown/Yates was an even bigger sensation in Europe than he was in the United States.

Ignoring his British roots and his residency Down Under, Yates set his stories in America, mostly in California. And he attributed his publishing success to his ability to “think like an American,” even though he never quite understood exactly how to use Yankee slang.

Reasoner, meanwhile, credits the popularity of these works to their provocative plots and racy dialogue. “The fact that they were often pretty funny, sometimes had surprisingly complex mysteries, and read extremely fast probably had something to do with it, too,” he remarks. It hardly seemed to matter to readers that, as the Web site Books and Writers points out, “The plots have turns that are not very believable. In one story a nightclub is used as a distribution center for drugs. The stripper hides heroin into her G-string and swaps it during her performance for a buyer’s tie in which the payoff is sewn into the lining.” In another book, Good Morning, Mavis (1957), the curvaceous Ms. Seidlitz “travels to New Orleans, where she is kissed several times during Mardi Grass festival and proposed [to] once. Her client is killed and becomes a zombie--or so Mavis believes. She is kidnapped by a monk and a jester and then saved by an undercover detective from the district attorney’s office.” So long as Yates stuffed his yarns with “action, wisecracks, coarse humor, [and] plenty of voluptuous un- and underdressed sexpots,” to quote Art Scott, readers forgave him his literary faults.

What really helped the Carter Brown novels to leap from shelves into the deep pockets of lonely men and teenagers who hadn’t yet experienced any of the acts so available to Yates’ protagonists, though, were their covers. Those covers promising wanton redheads and winsome nymphomaniacs. The covers with the busty women challenging their bikinis’ architecture, and young lovelies with smoky looks and impossibly long legs and nothing but the barest suggestion of fabric (at best) to conceal their shapely asses. The covers with the spicy, playful titles: The Bump and Grind Murders, Nymph to the Slaughter, Nude--With a View, The Pornbroker, Blonde on a Broomstick, The Plush-Lined Coffin, The Myopic Mermaid, The Girl Who Was Possessed. The covers by American artists such as Ron Lesser, Barye Phillips, and Robert McGinnis. Especially Robert McGinnis, whose Carter Brown book fronts became as recognizable as those he illustrated for Brett Halliday, M.E. Chaber, and Edward S. Aarons. (The cover atop this post, from Long Time No Leola [1967], is an excellent example of McGinnis’ art.) The best of the Brown jackets appeared during the 1960s; a decade later, new editions were carrying much less eye-popping photo fronts.

I won’t try to feature all of the Carter Brown jackets below; instead, here are some samples of the myriad editions that have been published around the world (click on the covers for enlargements):

(Interested in seeing more? Click here, here, and here.)

While Alan G. Yates never attained the critical respect enjoyed by Thomas B. Dewey, Talmage Powell, John D. MacDonald, or others; and he never had the impact on the genre that somebody like Mickey Spillane did, he was at least acknowledged for his immense body of work. In 1997, the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia bestowed upon him its Lifetime Achievement Award. Unfortunately, Yates wasn’t around to receive that honor. The man once known as Carter Brown died on May 5, 1985.

READ MORE: “Toni Johnson-Woods on the Carter Brown Mystery Theatre” (Mystery*File); “Fiction: Carter Brown--None But the Lethal and The Tigress,” by Bryin Abraham (Mostly Crappy Books); Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman has reviewed a number of the Carter Brown novels; and don’t forget to check out The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog.