Death on Milestone Buttress

Introduction

Glyn Carr, Showell Styles and Abercrombie Lewker

IF YOU LOOK UPON a mountain climb as taking place in a large,
open-air locked room, then Showell Styles was right to choose Glyn Carr as his
pseudonym for fifteen detective novels featuring Abercrombie Lewker, all of which
concern murders committed among the crags and slopes of peaks scattered around
the world. There’s no doubt that John Dickson Carr, the king of the locked room
mystery, would have agreed that Styles managed to find a way to lock the door
of a room that had no walls and only the sky for a ceiling. In fact, it was
while Styles was climbing a pitch on the classic Milestone Buttress on Tryfan
in Wales that it struck him “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 book was, of course, Death on Milestone Buttress, and
upon its publication Styles’ English publisher, Geoffrey Bles, immediately
asked for more climbing mysteries. Over the next eighteen years, Styles produced
another fourteen Lewker books before he halted the series, hav¬ ing run out “of
ways of slaughtering people on steep rock-faces.” But before Lewker put away
his ice axe and ropes for good, Styles managed to send him to Switzerland
{Murder on the Matterhorn), the Himalayas {A Corpse at Camp Two), Austria (The
Corpse in the Crevasse and Lewker in the Tirol), Scandinavia {Lezuker in
Norway) and Majorca {Holiday with Mur¬ der). The rest of the books were set in
the place Styles no doubt loves the best, Wales, where, now in his early 90s,
he still makes his home.