21 - ‘Our Least-Known Best Seller’

Summary

Alan Yates was a mid-century Australian crime-writing sensation, writing more than 300 books over a career that spanned the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Writing under the pseudonym of ‘Carter Brown’, he was published in thirty-five countries, including the United States, where his books were released by the Signet imprint of the prestigious New American Library, and his work was translated into twenty-seven languages. Yet he is now largely forgotten and, despite his impressive sales, received little recognition in Australia even at the height of his success. The lack of critical recognition afforded to Yates’s efforts largely flows from the fact that he wrote faux American mysteries and private detective fiction for Horwitz Publications, one of the largest and most dynamic of a group of Sydney pulp publishers that emerged in Australia after 1945. Yates’s career is an excellent lens through which to examine Australian pulp publishing’s operations in the context of other successful pulp authors, including its interactions with international publishing markets, as well as the author’s complex relationship with mainstream publishing, literary fashions and notions of authorial reputation in mid-century Australia.