Carter Brown—what can I say—born in England, he was based in Sydney but was a global phenomenon. He wrote 322 Chandler-style detective thrillers and heaps of other stuff at a rate of two books per month. The most attractive thing about his books were the half-naked girls on the covers, and it was by this that I was able to identify one that I had read. I read several, but can’t remember them, although, when I skimmed the one with the familiar girl, a couple of scenes came flooding back.
The corpse sat up in the casket, smiled brightly at the three of us and said. “Good morning!”
Brenner only had time for one more whimpering sound before his knees buckled under him and he passed out cold on the floor. I felt a slight pang of envy—at least his mind wasn’t about to become completely unhinged the way mine was.
The smile slowly faded from the corpse’s face: “Just what are you gentlemen doing in my bedroom?” she asked coldly.
But the beautiful brunette, tantalisingly naked under her shroud, who rises from the dead is really part of a complicated plot to hide the real body and help her gangster dad and lover Kirby get away with bank robbery and murder. At the end, she finishes back where she started, for real this time.
Kirby’s gun exploded, and as her body went limp and slid back toward the floor, Vicki Landau’s head suddenly rolled to one side. For a fragment of time, her dying eyes looked at me with stark disbelief in her own mortality, and then her head vanished beneath the table top.
For a moment there, I figured Kirby was confused by the unexpected attack from Vicki, and how he’d come to accidentally kill her. His confusion wasn’t going to last any time at all I was sure. So I took advantage of his momentary confusion, put three slugs into his chest which punched him back against the wall, and he was dead before he had time to be surprised, even.
Nice and simple. You gotta admit he had a neat touch.
Horrie and my mother had a soft spot for Lennie—apparently the result of first hand experience of how badly his father had treated him—and so he brought Evie to us first, as a trial run, I suppose, before presenting her in Warrnambool. Even I sensed it would not go well. Evie was the first hint I received that the sorts of women who appeared on the covers of Carter Brown could actually exist in reality. There was always a glimpse of the curve of a breast or a smooth thigh to be seen whenever she was around and I drank her in with utter intrigue. Moreover, when she caught me gaping at her latest exposed bit—which wasn’t difficult—she always smiled and manoeuvred herself subtly to give me a better view. Life when she was around was an almost continual rush of hot flushes.
