Danny Boyd

Created by Carter Brown
Pseudonym of Alan Geoffrey Yates
Other pseudonyms include Peter Carter Brown, Peter Carter-Brown, Raymond Glenning, Sinclair MacKellar, Dennis Sinclair and Paul Valdez
(1923-85)

“The trouble when you’re talking to a dame is that she’s a dame. The rise and fall of the luxuriant curves beneath the black cashmere … the deep outward curve if the thigh that was tantalizingly hidden … You listen to what she says, but your real concentration is a couple of places elsewhere.”
— Terror Comes Creeping

Australian book factory Carter Brown wrote at least thirty books about “New York’s toughest private eye” DANNY BOYD. Not sure if he was the toughest, but he might have been the smuggest, inordinately proud of his looks and his smarts. And although his home base was the Big Apple, Danny got around in at least a couple of books, popping up in Florida, California, England and Lover, Don’t Come Back! (1962) even found him in Australia, which his creator called home.

Brown wrote a ton of private eye novels, and all his male private eyes are pretty much cut from the same cloth: hard-boiled dicks who spend the majority of their time surrounded by dangerous men, and curvaceous (and often dangerous) women who (naturally) throw themselves at him. Which he doesn’t mind at all. Because, of course, what else are women good for?

Make no mistake: this is hard-charging pulp, heavy on the cheese and the oinkery, but often surprisingly well-written. Sure, the plots get a little convoluted along the way and could benefit from slowing down a little while going around the curves, but they’re pretty typical P.I. yarns for the post-Spillane era. The violence is lovingly detailed, and the sex (or at least the nudge-nudge wink-wink suggestions of it) are played up, although the scantily clad babes on the covers of the American paperbacks (by the likes of such classic illustrators as Barye Phillips or Robert McGinnis) are infinitely sexier than anything on the inside.

Prolific Australian author Carter Brown was also responsible for the adventures of private eyes Rick Holman and Mavis Seidlitz, as well as over-boiled Al Wheeler, a homicide cop with the sheriff’s department of Pine City, near Los Angeles. All in all, Brown must have written hundreds of slim, trashy paperbacks; raunchy, spicy little romps about as nutritious as potato chips, and just as hard to resist. Under the Carter Brown pen name alone, he published over 300 novels, but he also wrote as Peter Carter Brown, Peter Carter-Brown, Raymond Glenning, Sinclair MacKellar, Dennis Sinclair and Paul Valdez. Like most of his books, the Danny Boyd series hasn’t aged particularly well, and nowadays I think they’re mostly known (and highly prized by collectors) for their covers.

UNDER OATH

• “Anyone looking for a hard-boiled detective novel will probably be a bit disappointed, even though there is plenty of action and girls, girls, girls, but if you like other humor-oriented detectives like Richard Prather’s Shell Scott or Michael Avallone’s Ed Noon, then any of the series detectives of Carter Brown (they are in many ways interchangeable) might also be your cuppa.”
  — Ralph (August 2014, GoodReads)

NOVELS

• Death of a Doll (1956; aka “The Ever-Loving Blues”)
• Cutie Wins a Corpse (1957)
• Death on the Downbeat (1958 )
• Siren Signs Off (1958)
• Tempt a Tigress (1958)
• So Deadly, Sinner! (1959)
• Suddenly by Violence (1959)
• Walk Softly, Witch (n.) Signet 1959)
• The Dream Is Deadly (1960)
• The Wayward Wahine (1960)
• The Savage Salome (1961)
• The Seductress (1961)
• The Ice-Cold Nude (1962)
• Lover, Don’t Come Back! (1962)
• The Wayward (1962)
• Nymph to the Slaughter (1963)
• The Passionate Pagan (1963)
• The Silken Nightmare (1963)
• Catch Me a Phoenix! (1965)
• The Sometime Wife (1965)
• The Black Lace Hangover (1966)
• The Sometime Wife (1966)
• House of Sorcery (1967)
• The Mini-Murders (1968)
• Only the Very Rich? (1969 )
• Murder Is the Message (1970)
• The Coffin Bird (1971)
• The Angry Amazons (1972)
• The Sex Clinic (1972)
• Manhattan Cowboy (1973)
• The Early Boyd (1975)
• So Move the Body (1975)
• The Savage Sisters (1976)
• The Rip-Off (1979 )
• The Strawberry-Blonde Jungle (1979)
• Death to a Downbeat (1980)
• The Pipes Are Calling (1983)
• Kiss Michelle Goodbye (1984)
• The Real Boyd (1984)

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.