Thu 24 Mar 2011
A Review by Stephen Mertz: CARTER BROWN – Donavan’s Delight.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[8] Comments
CARTER BROWN – Donavan’s Delight. Belmont Tower, paperback original, 1979.
A few issues ago I was lamenting the discontinuance by Signet Books of their publication of the works of Alan Yates, who writes as Carter Brown and who is one of the very last practitioners of the tongue-in-cheek hardboiled style pioneered by Bellem, Latimer and Prather.
Yates published 179 short, snappy novels between 1953 and 1976. Then, for a while, he dropped out of sight. There was one science fiction novel published under his real name by Ace Books last year, so at least we knew the guy was still around.
And now, after a two year hiatus, “Carter Brown” has returned and Donavan’s Delight is the first of an all new, gaudily packaged series of books for the Belmont Tower line.
This one stars millionaire industrialist-adventurer Paul Donavan, who is one of Yates’ more interesting series characters. As the book opens, Donavan and his “man,” Hicks-an ex-mercenary who is more drinking and fighting buddy than butler-are confronted by a running lovely (nude, of course; the lovelies are almost always nude in Carter Brown books) who is being pursued across the open English countryside by a nasty with a whip on horseback.
Donavan and Hicks step in, naturally, and before the first chapter is out they’re tossed head first into an adventure of contraband weapons to third world nations, CIA shenanigans, quite a few nasty ladies and gentlemen and a brothel that specializes in the perversions of the very rich.
Like all of Yates’ previous books, this is almost novella length (my calculator figures it at about 40,000 words) and consists of mostly dialogue, some of it crude. There is violence and some graphic sex, and there isn’t a single word in all of the 139 pages to tax the vocabulary of anyone with at least a tenth grade education.
This will seem like pretty base stuff to readers of Ross Macdonald and LeCarre — and maybe it is; Yates is a pulpster, make no mistake, and certainly not to everyone’s taste — but if he’s no great shakes as a stylist, the man does have his good points and they too are fully in evidence in Donavan’s Delight.
The book boasts a superbly controlled narrative drive, two striking lead characters (in the figurative as well as the literal sense), Yates’ usual knack for sucking you into an interesting storyline right from the start, and a twisty, complicated whodunit mystery plot that is well resolved by the closing, violent denouement.
Litrachoor it ain’t, for sure. But it is fun of the “quick read” variety, and I for one am glad that “Carter Brown” is again back on the scene.
Editorial Comment: The science fiction novel referred to here by Steve was a new one for me, and of course I had to go looking for it. It didn’t take long, and as you see, I even found a cover image for it. The title is
Coriolanus, The Chariot!, a paperback original from Ace (July 1978). According to one ABE bookseller, it takes place “on the planet Thesbos, where the Word of Shakespeare is Law.”
I certainly don’t know how I missed this one. And no, there’s no snark involved in that statement at all.
March 24th, 2011 at 6:54 pm
Many years ago I had about a ton of Carter Brown’s books, but when I discovered I wasn’t reading them, I disposed of them. I have no memory where they went, but I hope whoever got them enjoyed them.
March 24th, 2011 at 7:36 pm
I remember reading this one back in the 1980’s
March 24th, 2011 at 9:48 pm
Brown was the last refuge of wackiness in a boringly sane world, and even his worst books tend to be painless fun to read.
Other than Mavis Seidlitz I always thought the Donavan and Andy Kane series were his most interesting because they weren’t set against his fake LA and New York backgrounds. Glad to know there is not only a Donavan I missed, but a science fiction novel too.
The planet Thesbos, eh?
Don’t worry, I won’t go there — in either sense.
Do want to read it though.
I suppose there isn’t much you can say about Brown. Anthony Boucher tended to review him well — and I think rightly so, because Brown spun entertaining yarns that might have been as nutritious as cotton candy, but who hasn’t eaten their share of cotton candy.
You can pick almost any Brown novel up, and for a half hour to an hour get out of the real world, meet some eccentric characters, fraternize with some beautiful mostly nude women, and get a mystery at least as complex as the average television variety — and usually more entertainingly presented.
Come to think of it, I think I have a cotton candy machine out in the storage shed …
March 24th, 2011 at 10:09 pm
I don’t think I’ve read a Carter Brown story in over 30 years, but before that, I must have read over a hundred of them. Time to put him back into the rotation, I think. Unlike Randy, I’ve kept all of mine, and for some of the titles, more than one copy. Different printings, different covers — you do understand, don’t you?
When CB found himself a new home at Belmont Tower, I was glad to see him back, but I thought the new X-rated approach the new books had was overdoing it. For me, CB was better at tease than he was at sleaze. (I think but am not sure that when Belmont Tower reprinted some of the original Signet titles, scenes of a more graphic nature were included.)
I think I have all of CB’s books published here in the US — except for the SF one — but some of the later ones may have escaped my net. I also have a dozen or so Carter Brown’s published in Australia, mostly tucked away in a storage unit. Time for some spring cleaning over there, I think!
March 24th, 2011 at 10:59 pm
Steve
I think most of us came to Brown though the McGinnis covers and then some of us stayed even when they switched to boring old photo covers.
Like you I thought the new more explicit books weren’t as good, but the same thing happened to Henry Kane and Peter Chambers and Frank Kane and Johnny Liddell. I guess they were trying to appeal to the soft core market of Man From ORGY and Coxeman, but all three were better at tease than sleaze.
Brown was even more of a publishing phenomena in Australia than here. There he wrote under several names and even had a long running comic strip based on Al Wheeler’s adventures (‘Carter Brown’ was a slightly comic reporter who featured in most of Al’s tales — I think Mavis Seidlitz may even have appeared once — as she did in a Wheeler novel).
I don’t know exactly why, but the Carter Brown books always reminded me of the Warner Brothers private eye television series like 77 SUNSET STRIP and SURFSIDE SIX — slick, flashy, entertaining, and mindless in a pleasant way.
It’s only in retrospect that you look over the huge content that Brown turned out and realise that for all his flaws he was pretty good too.
I look back now at some of the paperback original private eye series of the fifties and sixties — some into the seventies and even eighties — and I’m amazed at the over all quality (comparatively) of the writers. Granted, much of it was pretty generic, but I see hardcovers by best selling writers today who come nowhere near the basic skills these writers often brought to the game.
We took them for granted then — because we could afford to — but looking back there was a level of professionalism that only a small handful of writers today bring to the market, and sadly many of those don’t get the distribution or promotion they would have then.
March 25th, 2011 at 10:56 am
After reading all of the above I wish I had kept my copies — and wish I had actually read some of them. There was so much of him out there I thought he must be important and someone ought to be collecting him. I think I finally decided it didn’t have to be me.
March 25th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
The Mavis Seidlitz books were fun. Screwball comedies!
March 25th, 2011 at 8:27 pm
Nice to see you see you here, Steve. Even if it’s the 1979 model Mertz.