'In Franco Moretti's The Novel, "The Circle Widens" contains a series of essays that explore the transmission of literary forms using quasi-geographic frameworks (402-530). The seven essays use quantitative data to investigate the novel in Britain, the United States of America, Italy, Spain, Japan and Nigeria. Each essay tracks the spread and/or influence of the novel using statistical data. This essay adapts such "literary historiography" to a biological rather than geographical framework to chart the exportation of one of Australia's most successful literary exports, The Carter Brown Mystery Series (CBMS). The CBMS yields well to statistical analysis because of its large sample size (nearly 3000 titles) and its longevity (thirty years) ... I propose that the CBMS phenomenon can be seen, in terms of an epidemiological metaphor, as a literary pandemic.' (163-164)