"Murder on the Matterhorn"

Can you conceive of a wide-open mountainside as the perfect setting for a "locked room" or impossible crime mystery? Author Glyn Carr could and did, turning out more than a dozen first-rate mysteries set on mountainsides.

Carr's second novel, published in 1951, was "Murder on the Matterhorn," set on the rocky face of one of the world's most famous mountains. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can listen to here. Carr's amateur detective, Shakespearean actor Abercrombie Lewker (known as "Filthy" to his friends) is called upon to solve the murder of an experienced climber who apparently falls to his death during a solo ascent of the Matterhorn. While there is no shortage of people with excellent motives (including some extreme political groups), it appears, from the evidence, that nobody could possibly have committed the crime.

Glyn Carr was the pen name of Showell Styles, an accomplished mountaineer, and his love for the sport of mountain climbing is apparent on almost every page of his books. Even a devout coward and confirmed acrophobe like me gains some appreciation of this beautiful and - the author insists - not particularly dangerous sport. (Well, I suppose it's dangerous when there are murderers about.) Glyn Carr's books nicely combine mountaineering and seemingly impossible crimes. If you haven't read any of his books, "Murder on the Matterhorn" can be a good place to start.

As this book was published in 1951, I am submitting it to the continuing Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge at the My Reader's Block book blog. If you haven't been there yet to check out some of the books oher people are reading, you're missing some first-rate suggestions for fine pre-1960 mysteries.

Comments

[Yvette]

Well, here's another one I've never heard of. I am slowly getting an inferiority complex here, Les. So many books I've never read. Or at least IF I read them way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I have no memory of them. Jeez.

I'm adding this to my ever-growing list of vintage TBR. :)

[Les Blatt]

Yvette, the ever-reliable Rue Morgue Press has reissued about a half-dozen of the Glyn Carr books. They're all fun - Lewker is a delight - and you'd be amazed at the ingenuity of using a bare mountainside as the setting for an impossible murder. I must disclaim responsibility for any damage done when those tottering TBR piles collapse under their own weight... ;-)