'Despite Carter Brown’s status as the least known of Australia’s most successful authors, research has been done on his productions, his style, and his bibliography. This work, by its very nature, often precludes close reading of a traditional kind. A certain amount is known for example, of the purchase of the international rights to the Carter Brown mystery series by American publisher Signet in 1958, but no work has been done on the effects that this shift may have had on the novels themselves. This article proposes to read Last Note For a Lovely, a novel published the year before the deal with Signet was signed, in order to lay the foundations for future analyses of subsequent Carter Brown novels published after 1958. The reflexivity of this novel is such that the characters appear at times to be voicing the concerns of Alan Yates, the writer behind Carter Brown.' (Publication abstract)
