Looking back through the archives here, I find reviews of three more books that combine mystery, murder and mountaineering, all by Glyn Carr, the author of "Death Finds a Foothold" which is this week's review. Carr was the pen name of mountaineer Showell Styles, and his love for the sport and for the mountain regions of Wales and elsewhere shines through all of his books.
Styles' first book was "Death on Milestone Buttress
," published in 1951. In their introduction to the Rue Morgue Press edition, Tom and Enid Schantz quote the author as saying he had been struck by "how easy it would be to arrange an undetectable murder in that place, and by way of experiment I worked out the system and wove a thinnish plot around it." That really doesn't do justice to the ingenuity of the plot or to the strong personality of his detective character, actor Abercrombie "Filthy" Lewker.
Did she fall or was she pushed? That's the centerpiece of "The Youth Hostel Murders
," as a young mountaineer dies in a suspicious accident in Cumberland. The death takes place near an ancient stone circle, leading some observers to speculate that malevolent spirits may have had something to do with it. Lewker thinks the culprit is much more likely to be a human...
In "Death Under Snowdon
," Lewker is invited on a climb in northern Wales by a politician who is largely unknown to him. When the politician is murdered, Lewker and his friend, police Detective Inspector George Grimmett, must sift through clues to find the person behind a murder that - apparently - nobody could have committed.
All these books are available in editions from the Rue Morgue Press, which has now added a fifth Glyn Carr mystery to its list: "Murder on the Matterhorn
." I haven't read that one yet - but it's on my list.
If you'd like to hear my reviews of the earlier Carr books, you can find links to all of the available Classic Mysteries podcast reviews on this page.
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