Habeas Corpus: Carter Brown and the Production of <i>The Body</i>

Carter Brown has an important place in Australian and in French studies. On the one hand, he has become famous for not being famous; indeed, introducing him as the most prolific Australian author that most Australians have never heard of has become something of a cliché. On the other, it is Carter Brown, and not Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, nor even Peter Cheyney or James Hadley Chase, who, in sheer volume, dominates the catalogue of that most illustrious of French crime series, la Série noire, which means that his name has also become a regular feature of French crime fiction studies. Caught somewhere between being neglected and ever-present, Brown remains understudied, in both senses of the word—not only are there insufficient studies of Brown, but when he is mentioned it is typically in a walk-on role in a study of something else, be it the commercial logics of Australian pulp publishing or the linguistic particularities of the Série noire. If Brown has a logical place in this special issue in honour of John West-Sooby, it is because John’s work has brought these various aspects together: in his research on the place of Australian authors in the Série noire, John has done more than anyone to weave together Australian and French studies under the banner of what we recognize, in ASFS and AJFS circles, as “Australian French studies”; and in this work, as a pioneer of the periphery, he has demonstrated with characteristic clarity the important role of paratextual apparatuses in Australian and French crime fiction, and in so doing, put Brown’s works back in the spotlight. In this article uses John’s work as a guide for re-reading (in the sense of reading closely, of course, but also just reading ) one of the most important Brown novels, The Body , with which he made his international début, with American publishers Signet, and which, as À pâlir la nuit , was also his first title in the Série noire.