Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 25

“Filthy” Lewker 21 Carr has a good sense of humor, which frequently appears in these tales: witness his native Welshmen, provincial of outlook and given to odd speech, yet these accounts are as dark as the usual detective fiction. The genre, of course, is almost anomalous by definition. Detective fiction is more or less considered light reading fare, and yet deals with murder, theft, illicit sex, guilt, envy, greed—the staples of tragedy. Great works like L e s M is e r a b le s or C r im e a n d P un is h m e n t, for instance, deal with identical problems but aren’t even considered in the same circles. The tone of the detective novel can be flat (police procedurals), humorous, blase, noir, featuring, say, case-hardened cops, the mercenary but somehow moral private eye who’s seen it all and survived, but the genre never seems to plumb the depths of despair or enlightenment of serious fiction. The ingredients are present but the product does not quite justify the expense. Still, murder and death are by definition serious. Even the lightest of crime novel protagonists, Christie’s Tuppence Beresford, for instance, or her gentle Jane Marple, must face evil. Do they deserve more serious respect and attention? Ruth Rendell pretty much demanded it, calling Christie superficial and preferring to be compared to Patricia Highsmith, another possible candidate for higher awards (M u rd ero u s Ink 60). Dorothy Sayers at her best is a bit beyond summer vacation pages out of a handbag. In any event, where does Carr stand vis-a-vis such competition? His puzzles are ingenious if not superb. He can fool us and he isn’t given to outrages like Christie’s having the narrator himself do it, or the dead victim do it in another case, or everyone do it in her famous O r ie n t E xp ress. Further, he has blocked off an area peopled by few rivals. Jill Neate’s exhaustive bibliography of mountaineering literature lists 411 works of fiction dealing with mountains (most of them, of course, not involving crime, and many only peripherally connected with mountains as such). Styles, under various interests, counts for at least 10 percent of them. Dorothy Sayers took Peter Wimsey to Scotland’s heights in F iv e R e d H e rr in g s (1931). Mary Stewart’s W ildfire a t M id n ig h t (1956) uses The Isle of Skye. There’s Lionel Davidson’s R o s e o f T ibet (1962), or Duff Hart-Davis’s H eig h ts o f R im rin g (1980), Steven Voien’s In a H ig h a n d L o n e ly P la ce (1992), James Ramsey Ullman’s The W hite T o w e r (1945), or Van Wyck Mason’s H im a la y a n A ss ig n m e n t (1952), this one even furnished with Colonel North, a sort of detective. Trevanian’s E ig e r S a n ctio n (1972), back in Switzerland, reached a million copies and sired a blockbuster movie featuring Clint Eastwood. We fans of such thrillers are all supposed to know A.E. Mason’s R unning W ater (1907) with the spectacular climb on the Brenva Ridge of Mont Blanc. There are a few others, but straight sleuthing on the heights is pretty much Lewker’s exclusive territory. We need to examine in greater detail the 15 forays into mountainous thinner air. Number one in the series is D e a th on M ile s to n e B u ttress (1951). We have already met Lewker in T r a it o r ’s M ountain but as a secret-service agent, not part of this series and brought to life under Styles’s real name. Here is the classic examination of places, times, possible speeds in ascent and descent, the breaking