One rule dictated Horwitz's list throughout its time as a pulp paperback publisher: it had to sell. ‘Saleable was the operative word in those days. It had to be about sales otherwise we wouldn't have existed,’ recalls Lyall Moore.

No sales records have survived for The Lady Is Murder but it must have performed well as Horwitz subsequently signed a contract with Yates to pen an ongoing Carter Brown series, beginning with two, 20,000-word books a month. Yates’ widow, Denise, would tell an interviewer much later that her husband signed a 30-year contract, paying him a pound per 1,000 words and then a pound per 1,000 in royalties after the first 18,000 copies had been sold. Within a few years Horwitz was doing print runs of 30,000 to 40,000 for each Carter Brown. In a double page advertisement in the July 1958 issue of Ideas About Books and Bookselling, Horwitz claimed Carter Brown had a monthly readership of 100,000 in Australia and ‘has achieved the phenomenal sales record of 17,000,000 copies in five years.’ Although these figures are impossible to confirm, they nonetheless provide some indication of the publishing success enjoyed by the series. As has already been noted, the strongest theme of the pulp fiction published by Horwitz from 1945 to the mid to late 1950s, was its American or, more accurately ‘faux American’ nature, of which the Carter Brown books are the best-known example. In addition to providing an important insight into the evolution of Horwitz's publishing model from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the Carter Brown phenomenon also enables a deeper discussion as to why faux American pulp proved so popular in Australia after the war.

Leopard Skin Print and Murder: Examining the Carter Brown Formula

Compiling an exact bibliography for Yates's output over the period from the late 1940s, when he wrote his earliest pulp fiction for Action Comics to his last novel in 1977 (he died in 1985) is difficult, not only due to his output but also the fact that so many of his books have been reissued, often multiple times, some with different titles.