Glyn Carr

Frank Showell Styles was a Welsh writer and mountaineer. He wrote mystery novels under pen-name of Glyn Carr.

Styles was born in Four Oaks, Warwickshire, England in 1908 and died at his long-time home in Wales in 2005. He did his first mountain trek at the age of three and spent the rest of his life scrambling over rocks, snow, ice, and mountains. During World War II Styles used his shore leave from the Royal Navy to pioneer new ascents in North Africa and Malta. After he was discharged, Styles led two exploring and climbing expeditions to the Lyngen Peninsula, 250 miles from the Arctic Circle, where he climbed seven virgin peaks. In 1954, he led an expedition to the Himalayas to attempt a 22,000-foot peak in the Manaslu range in Nepal. He published numerous books on climbing as well as young adult fiction. 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 is 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, which first appeared in 1951 and was published for the first time in the United States by the Rue Morgue Press in 2000. Upon its original publication Styles' English publisher, Geoffrey Bles, immediately asked for more climbing mysteries. Over the next eighteen years, Styles produced another fourteen Lewker books (fifteen, counting one last, currently lost manuscript) before he halted the series, having run out "of ways of slaughtering people on steep rock faces."