Alan Geoffrey Yates was born in London and educated at schools in Essex. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the Royal Navy as a lieutenant. After the war he worked as a sound recordist at Gaumont-British Films for two years and moved to Australia in 1948. In the same year he became an Australian citizen. Before devoting himself entirely to writing from 1953, Yates was a salesman in Sydney and a public relations staff member at Quatas Empire Airways. His early books were intended only for Australian audience, but when Carter Brown series was picked up by the New American Library, he found readers also in the United States. There his book covers were often illustrated by Barye Phillips and Robert McGinnis. In France Gallimard started to publish Carter Brown's works in 1959 in Série Noire (number 477), which also published such writers as James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyney, Horace McCoy, Jonathan Latimer, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. In Australia the Brown books were published by Horwitz, one of Sydney's leading paperback houses. Yates was married with Denise Sinclair Mackellar; they had one daughter and three sons. (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cbrown.htm)
Alan Geoffrey Yates (1923-85) began his writing career as a contributor to Horwitz's 'Scientific Thriller' series in the 1940s. He also wrote westerns, romances, and horror stories - under various pseudonyms, including 'Paul Valdez' and 'Tex Conrad' - but was soon persuaded to concentrate on crime fiction. He initially published under the name 'Peter Carter Brown', or 'Peter Carter-Brown', until 1958 when 'Carter Brown' was judged more appealing to the American market. Between 1951 and 1984 Horwitz published hundreds of 'Carter Brown' titles, many of which were taken up by the American paperback publisher Signet - individual titles achieving sales of up to 200,000. They were also highly popular in Europe. [X(][X(][X(][:)][8D]
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Eembden11/Engels2/yates.htm
