 He knows, of course, that it will be no more help than the last Dexedrine tablet but still clings to the naïve hope that, somehow, sometime, he will find a way of avoiding the recurrence of his present hopeless situation.’

His books, originally published by Horwitz and Signet, were set in the United States and published throughout the anglophone world.In its obituary for Yates in 1985, "The New York Times" noted that he had written "some 30 detective novels with American backgrounds before ever having visited the United States ...He said he chose American settings because Australians preferred them."