The Tigress (1961) opens with a corpse of a young secretary found in the coffin meant for the wife of her boss. Lieutenant Al Wheeler investigates this bizarre crime while an impressive array of suspects provide conflicting accounts to baffle him. My favorite part is when Wheeler is stalked by a deadly black panther! A sex club, a nymphomaniac, and cunning killer make this Carter Brown mystery as sharp as the claws of a tigress. GRADE: B+
In The Exotic (1961), County Sheriff Lavers, Al Wheeler’s boss, is outraged when a cab delivers a corpse to his house. Lavers orders Wheeler to find the culprit and determine why the dead body was sent to him. Wheeler discovers a crime committed years ago led to the murder of an investment professional who was framed for embezzlement. Two thugs who search for the missing $100,000 rough Al Wheeler up…but Wheeler gets his revenge. Plenty of plot twists in this one! GRADE: A-
Angel! (1962) opens with a bang! A small plane explodes from a time bomb and the pilot is killed. Al Wheeler is one of the witnesses. But, was the pilot the intended victim…or was some else the real target? Wheeler investigates a group of retired fighter pilots and the women in their lives. With a million dollars at stake, Wheeler has no problem with finding a motive among a group of men who learned to kill in the military. GRADE: B+
Carter Brown’s Al Wheeler series mixes wild mysteries, beautiful women, sarcasm, action, and clever investigation into a blend that has entertained readers for over a half a century! Don’t miss this excellent Stark House omnibus edition!
Carter Brown was one of my favouritesin the 60s because his stories were so wild compared to the novels by Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace etc that I grew up with because an elderly friend of the family had a large collection and I was allowed to read them in his library -of course not to take them home ….
I’ve probably told this story before.
Almost every morning on my way from the railway station to university I passed a little bookstore that had some Carter Brown novels on display. Those crazy pictures fascinated me so in the end I had to buy a book – though it was darn expensive being imported from the USA.
And when I took the other street from the station I had to pass another bookstore (yes, there were many of them – 12 000 students who wanted/needed to read books, now btw 28 000) which had SF magazines on display …
If I had owned enough money I would have bought one book or one magazone evry day to read on the train journey, but no way!
No misunderstanding please:
Of course this family friend had no Carter Brown novels, only those classical British books.
Wolf, Carter Brown was an international sensation in the 1960s. Now, STARK HOUSE is bringing these wonderful books back to a new audience!
I firmly believe only two things got me through my college days: 1) the fact that there were some down saloons close to my dormitory, and 2) Carter Brown books, of which there were plenty and cost only a quarter apiece. There were days when I would read two or three Carter Browns rather than do my academic work. I attribute my high literary standards of today to the gazillion of Carter Browns I read back then.
And it shows, Jerry! Nice choice.
Jeff, Carter Brown wrote 51 Al Wheeler mysteries so STARK HOUSE has plenty of these omnibuses to go! I’ll review them all!
Jerry, I read plenty of Carter Browns in the 1960s when they were inexpensive and available everywhere. It’s fun to reread them now!
Who is doing the cover art on the CB reprints these days? That’s not a reprint of McGinnis or Lesser from the Signets. Is the cover art credited?
Art, here are the cover credits: cover design by Jeff Vorzimmer, caliente/design, Austin, Texas
Cover art by Bernard Barton
Text design by Mark Shepard, shepgraphics.com
Barton was a busy pb cover artist in the ’50s, mainly for PopLib & Ace. The woman on the Stark House cover was presumably lifted from one of those covers. Has a familiar look to it , I may even have the book it came from.
Art, I recognized Barton’s name and dimly remember the woman on the cover. Let me know if you discover the original paperback appearance.
I saw the ’70s mm PBS, but never did pick one up to read. Still, all these years later, haven’t tried them. Stark House making it rather easy, clearly…though I suspect reading copies of the flashy photo-cover volumes of yore might still be reasonable.
Ha! Spellchecker *knew* I meant the TV network rather than paperbacks…”pbs”…
Todd, spellcheckers have Too Much Power!
Todd, I stopped buying Carter Browns when they sported those terrible photo-covers. And, I heard rumors those later Carter Browns from the 1980s were ghost-written.
George, the Yates estate insists that he wrote all of the books, with the exception of ten books written by C. J. McKenzie (an editor for the Australian publisher Horowitz) in 1968 while Yates was overseas. Robert Silverberg was supposed to have written four of the Carter Browns, a rumor that I believe too be true; however, whether those books were actually published and under what titles, is anybody’s guess.
Jerry, thanks for that clarification. As I told Greg Shepard, the brilliant editor of STARK HOUSE, I donated 250 Carter Brown paperbacks to the State University of New York at Buffalo’s Special Collections back in 1995. But, I stopped buying those hideous Carter Brown paperbacks in the 1980s because the covers were garbage.