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.

This chapter investigates how Faulkner uses the figure of eyes as inkwells in his depiction of Temple Drake in his sensationalist 1931 novel Sanctuary where she is raped with a corncob by an impotent gangster. The ink represents the various narratives men imagine themselves drawing from her – she is either too sexual or not sexual enough, the victim of a crime or its instigator. Faulkner wrote Requiem for a Nun (1951) as a sequel to Sanctuary that in many ways recapitulates this sadism, but he suggests the possibility that Temple herself could achieve a new kind of agency as a paperback writer in the manner of Faulkner penning these salacious novels and eventually profiting from them. The topic of masculinity in Faulkner’s work is also fraught terrain. In Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Margaret Powers surprises the young Robert Saunders swimming naked; his body, the narrator says, looked like the color of old paper. This marks on Robert’s body a female gaze. Throughout his career, Faulkner wrestled with the idea that writing connotes effeminacy over and against masculine action, but spiritually and physically strong women become connected with writing in ways that defy a strict gender binary.