Gun in Cheek by Bill Pronzini Page A

the Pacific to the United States, when a package deal was arranged with New American Library (Signet Books). Brown was an instant success in the booming paperback market of the time, and from 1958 until the mid-1970s, he amassed the bulk of his impressive sales figures from among the American audience.
    Yates created a number of series characters in the fifties and sixties, the first of these being the well-endowed private eye with the unlikely name of Mavis Seidlitz. Other of his heroes include a private cop, Rick Holman, who operates out of Hollywood; a randy San Francisco lawyer with the appropriate name of Randy Roberts; and a Hollywood scriptwriter, Larry Baker, and his besotted partner Boris Slivka. But Yates's most successful creation, the detective whose escapades first interested NAL in Carter Brown, is Al Wheeler, a lieutenant with the sheriff's office of Pine City County, an obviously fictional locale in southern California.
    One of the reasons for Wheeler's success here is that he is an American character operating in a more or less recognizable American setting. (The same is true, to a lesser extent, for the success of Mavis Seidlitz et al.) Foreign writers have not often managed to create believable American characters or to capture an authentic American flavor in dialogue, action, and background; but with the exception of a dubious command of American slang, Yates has shown a remarkable facility for Americanizing his books. Frequent trips to this country no doubt helped, as did an uncanny ability to, as he put it in the aforementioned television interview, "think like an American."
    An uncanny ability to think sophomorically hasn't hurt, either.
    The key to an evaluation and appreciation of the Carter Brown novels is that word "sophomoric." Everything about them may be described with the same adjective—sophomoric plots (of the type television viewers have been treated to regularly on such shows as Charlie's Angels), sophomoric humor, sophomoric dialogue, sophomoric sex, and even sophomoric violence (reckoning from the point of view, say, of a Spillane addict). The books are all quite short—of less than fifty thousand words—and so fast-paced and formularized that they can be read in less than half an hour. After which they will promptly be forgotten. Anyone who has read more than one Carter Brown novel will be hard-pressed to synopsize the plot of any of them.
    Sex, to be sure, is the main ingredient of each and every Brown title—no more so than in the Al Wheeler series. Wheeler is a very horny cop. He is forever bantering with beautiful women, ogling their breasts, leering at their behinds, pawing at their clothing and bare flesh, and/or thinking about rolling them in the hay. Sometimes he attains that primary objective; sometimes he doesn't. In that respect, at least, the series is true to life.
    This is Wheeler about to make a conquest:
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    I lay back against the cushions as her arms tightened around my neck and that nuclear fission started again as her lips met mine. I didn't know how long that clinch lasted—who puts a stopwatch on ecstasy? But finally, she wasn't kissing me anymore.
    I knew how she felt. Sometimes you just have to stop for a moment and take a deep breath. I slid further down Onto the couch and waited patiently. "You may kiss me again, honey-chile," I murmured. "Let me drink the magnolia-blossom from your lips!" (The Victim)
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    And this is Wheeler bantering about sex:
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"Appearances can be deceptive, you know that? I mean, you look very virile indeed, Al, but maybe it's all a big fake?"
"I'll prove it, if you like," I said determinedly. "Give me a cracker, and I'll break it with my bare hands!"
"There has to be   more interesting way of proving it," she said throatily.   "Like, if I took you upstairs to my room, as soon as we've finished this drink?"
I shook my head regretfully. "I'm not allowed to make love to any suspect in a homicide case. It's a