I can still vividly recall a black-and-white photograph of my late father on holiday at Surfers Paradise, on Queensland's Gold Coast, in the mid-1950s. The photograph, which I no longer have, showed him wearing dark sunglasses, his hair styled in the neat crew-cut he favoured all his life. He is sitting on the beach reading Kiss and Kill a pulp mystery novel by Carter Brown, first published in 1955 by Sydney-based Horwitz Publications (hereafter referred to as Horwitz). Male, late twenties, an ex-serviceman, on the cusp of entering the country's burgeoning middle class, my father was what many would have then viewed as the typical pulp fiction reader. And Carter Brown's exotic brand of American-style crime fiction was a cheap, portable form of escapism in a country only just shrugging off wartime austerity and still a year away from the introduction of television. My father had a large selection of pulp paperbacks on the shelves of his den. In addition to his Carter Brown novels, I remember books by Marc Brody, another American-style pulp crime series penned by an Australian author for Horwitz. I spent many hours in my teens thumbing through these books, the cheap paper yellowed with age, searching for explicit passages. But it was the cover art that most fascinated. Tough, trench coated male private investigators, femmes fatales in a range of provocative poses, nearly always depicted against modern urban backgrounds. The images and the seamy cadence of the titles offered a glimpse into an exotic interior world of post-war Australia.

Kiss and Kill was one of approximately 300 novels – the precise number is unclear – penned by Brown, a pseudonym for Alan Yates, a mid-century Australian crime writer whose career spanned the late 1940s to his last novel, The Dream Merchant, in 1977. Horwitz was in the habit of sensationalising the biographical details of its authors to collapse the distinction between their real identity, their authorial persona and the genre of pulp fiction they wrote. The back cover of Kiss and Kill featured a photograph of the bespectacled ‘Peter Carter Brown’ (Yates), as the author was called early in the series, alongside the following biographical details: