Alan Geoffrey Yates (aka Carter Brown) was a literary phenomenon. Born in England, Yates married and settled in Australia in 1948 where he worked as a film technician, a salesman and in public relations for Qantas before taking up writing full-time. The incredible early success of his Carter Brown novellas in the 1950s meant that he was contracted to produce one short novel and two long novels each and every month. In reality, he was truly prolific with 322 published Carter Brown novels. Carter Brown was a huge international success with reportedly 120 million books in print, second only to The Bible in terms of the number of languages they were translated into. There was a comic book series, the ‘Carter Brown Murder
Mystery Hour’ on radio, three French films, a Japanese TV series, and a French literary award for ‘The most whiskies drunk in a single novel’. He was also rumoured to be one of John F. Kennedy’s favourite authors. In the early 1980s, Yates and Richard O’Brien of The Rocky Horror Show fame wrote a musical of The Stripper, described in classic Carter Brown terminology as ‘the girl who says it all from the neck down’. Yates died in 1985 in Sydney. In 1997, he was posthumously awarded a Ned Kelly, Australia’s leading literary award for
crime writing, for his lifelong contribution to the art.