Frank Showell Styles was an extremely prolific author and also a noted mountaineer. His two interests coalesced when he wrote detective novels, and most of his work in the crime genre appeared under the name Glyn Carr and featured Sir Abercrombie Lewker (known as 'Filthy' - filthy lucre, geddit?) as a rumbustious amateur detective. The Glyn Carr hardbacks are now quite hard to find and copies in nice condition are highly collectible.
I'm afraid I've tended to steer clear of Glyn Carr over the years, since mountaineering holds no great interest as far as I'm concerned. But I thought it was high time that I took a proper look at his work and where better to start than with a novel set in Snowdonia, a part of the world which the author loved, as I do. Death under Snowdon fitted the bill perfectly.
Lewker is about to receive his knighthood, and is contacted by an acquaintance who is due to be similarly honoured. This chap, David Webhouse, is an unappetising politician (aren't they all? some would ask) whose left-wing leanings were not, I suspect, shared by the author. He wants Lewker's help, knowing Filthy's taste for solving puzzles, but is rather mysterious about the precise nature of the problem he faces. Lewker accepts an invitation to a house party in Snowdonia but Webhouse is killed in an explosion, apparently the result of a booby-trap. Was he murdered and, if so, whodunit?
This is a pretty good traditional mystery and the setting is a bonus. There are some technicalities involved in the solution that call to mind the likes of John Rhode and Freeman Wills Crofts; given that this novel was published in 1954, when the Golden Age had lost some of its glitter - certainly so far as publishers and critics were concerned - Carr was swimming against the tide of literary fashion. But this is a well-crafted novel and I enjoyed it enough to want to read more of his work.
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