Carter Brown was the literary pseudonym of Alan Geoffrey Yates (1 August 1923 – 5 May 1985), an English-born Australian writer of detective fiction.

He was born on 1 August 1923 at Ilford, Essex, England, the only child of Harry Thomas Yates a railway clerk, and his wife Linda Annie, née Willingale.

They married on 3 June 1946 at St Chad’s Church of England, Cremorne, New South Wales.

In England he went back to British Acoustic Films as a sound cameraman, a job he found unrewarding.

After working as a salesman, wine company clerk and newsagent supplier, Yates joined Qantas Empire Airways Ltd. as a publicity writer where he produced their monthly flight magazine as well as the staff journal.

[4] In his spare time he wrote a western, which was accepted by Invincible Press,[5] where he was paid £20, or £1 per 1000 words.

Soon he was also writing for Horwitz Publications where he authored horror, science-fiction and detective stories, published under the pen names of ‘Paul Valdez’ and ‘Tod Conway’.

His publisher encouraged him to specialise on crime genre novellas and then full-length detective novels, the first of which was Murder is My Mistress (1954).

Horwitz lured him to become a full-time writer, offering him a contract that guaranteed a weekly income of £30 against royalties.

In the mid-1950s Yates was turning out more than twenty books a year; they were also published in England and Finland.

In 1958 the New American Library began to publish his novels (beginning with The Body) under the Signet label and with the author listed as Carter Brown, a name judged most suitable for the American market.

Eventually his books were translated into fourteen languages, including German and Japanese.

He wrote westerns under the pseudonym Todd Conway, and science fiction under Paul Valdez.

In reality, Yates was truly prolific with 322 published Carter Brown novels, including multiple series variously featuring protagonists Mike Farrell, Andy Kane, Mavis Seidlitz, Lt. Al Wheeler, Rick Holman, Danny Boyd, Larry Baker, Zelda Roxanne, et al.

Yet despite the enormity of his output, a 1963 profile in Pix magazine revealed he approached deadlines 'with the reluctance of a long-distance swimmer shivering on the brink of a cold, grey English Channel.

In the manic depressive moments of the third night without sleep – when the deadline is long past and the mental block has set solid as concrete, the writer inevitably descends into self-analysis.

He knows, of course, that it will be no more help than the last Dexedrine tablet but still clings to the naïve hope that, somehow, sometime, he will find a way of avoiding the recurrence of his present hopeless situation.’ His books, originally published by Horwitz and Signet, were set in the United States and published throughout the anglophone world.

In its obituary for Yates in 1985, The New York Times noted that he had written "some 30 detective novels with American backgrounds before ever having visited the United States ...

The novels were also popular in Europe where they were translated into French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Finnish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch.

Carter Brown's huge international success saw reportedly 120 million books in print, second only to The Bible in terms of the number of languages into which they were translated.

The success of the books also spawned 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'.

[citation needed] 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'.

C. J. McKenzie, an editor for Horwitz, was commissioned to write ten of the Carter Brown novels while Yates was overseas in 1958.

[6] McKenzie also wrote crime books as Mike Boon and war novels as Michael Owen.

When a lawyer drops dead at Al Wheeler's feet, poisoned with curare, nobody who knew the guy cares, so everyone is a suspect.

Trying to identify a pickled head in a jar lands Al Wheeler between an entitled family and a pair of gangsters, one dubbed "The Creeping Terror".

The Million Dollar Babe (February 1961) [rewritten from "Cutie Cashed His Chips", 1955] 3.

Perfumed Poison (July 1954) 1 Sweetheart You Slay Me (September 1952) 2 Blackmail Beauty (1953) 1.

Goddess Gone Bad (September 1958) Secret agent of a private organisation known as SURVIVAL.

The Friends Of Lucifer (1977) Publisher of "The Sultan" and owner of "The Harem" key club.