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Popular Culture Review
America’s Cleaver family. Lewker’s creator seems to have spent the same
blameless days haunting his beloved Welsh peaks, occasionally venturing
abroad, and dispensing the rest of his love on those sesquicentenary volumes.
Just one striking difference: Styles was trim and lean, living to an active almost
97 (1908-2005); his alter ego was, an c o n tr a ir e , “bald and bulbous nosed
five-foot eight and broad out of proportion,” but with a voice, booming, filling
the room “like the music of a double bass” (M a tterh o rn 7). He’s pompous in
manner as befits his lofty Shakespearean status, and yet a kindly, all-around fine
specimen of the upper-crust Brit.
Printings of mystery story books are rarely huge (Agatha Christie’s works
not included in this rule, however); once read, the reader knows the solution and
waits for next year’s sequel. Hence most crime writers, even the most popular,
tend to write a lot of them. Carr’s are out of print. You can seek them out on
Ebay or in some mystery-story bookshop (they do exist), but the search won’t be
easy. Recently a few—not all by any means—were electronically listed, priced
from $100-5750, the latter, unfortunately, for one I needed to finish this paper. I
had to resort to the Library of Congress. In short, the Lewker saga has taken on a
sort of cult status and deservedly so. Still, researching details remains pretty
much virgin territory. There is no mention in Dilys Winn’s reasonably
compendious M u r d e r Ink. MLA’s International Bibliography remains blank.
There is no biography of Styles himself—perhaps not unexpected in so modest a
f