The Body in the Beck - Joanna Cannan

There are some detectives in the history of crime fiction who were created for the express purpose of infuriating the reader, I think.  Roger Sheringham was probably one of the first smug detectives who was far from likeable in his first few outings.  There's Philo Vance with his prissy urbanity and show-off erudition.  I recall a police inspector character created by American mystery writer Hugh Austin named Peter Quint who was one rude sonofabitch when dealing with his suspects. And if you flash forward a couple of decades out of the Golden Age it's hard to avoid Joyce Porter's insufferably lazy, rude and sloppy Wilfrid Dover. Some of these detectives are created as comic figures of  ridicule, others seem to have earned their irritating and annoying traits unintentionally. In the school of the detective as object of ridicule we can place Inspector Ronald Price who makes his debut in The Body in the Beck, (1952) one of Joanna Cannan's few forays into legitimate detective fiction.

Price is tasked with investigating the murder of a man found dead in the mountains of the Lake District.  He immediately suspects Francis Worthington, an academic and mountaineer, who discovered the body found beaten and possibly drowned in a small stream (the "beck" of the title).  Cannan sets up Price as a fool of a policeman and proceeds to discredit him both in his professional capacity and in his narrow minded view of humanity.  He is painted as a xenophobic prig uptight about sex.  She reveals him to be pretentious in manner and speech, moralistic about crime, and supercilious in his treatment of suspects he feels are his superiors. Everyone he interrogates is appalled by his lack of respect at an Oxford college where he tries to learn what he can about Worthington.  Old Man Meade, a veteran don, is particularly disturbed by Price's lack of grammatical skill during their interview. This is a remarkable kind of protagonist for any mystery writer to introduce.  Shockingly, Price goes onto appear in four more books.  Cannan must have been amusing herself a great deal.

The detective plot is scant. It is clear that Worthington is innocent and he sets out to try to clear his name as Price continues to move adamantly forward in an attempt to prove him guilty.  Price lucks out when he runs fingerprints on the victim and learns he has a police record primarily for extortion and crimes related to an intimidation racket. But his obsession with Worthington soon leads the reader to give up all hope on Inspector Price solving the crime.  More and more one looks forward to Worthington's few scenes of detective work. When he sees someone making frequent trips to an abandoned well he begins to piece together the mystery of who, how, and why the victim was killed and dumped in the mountain stream. The identity of the murder therefore does not come as too much of a surprise in the end, though the motive and other aspects leading up the murder do supply a mild eyebrow raising moment.

If the book fails to excite as a mystery novel it cannot be said that it is altogether uninteresting. What distinguishes this book is Cannan's skillful characterizations, especially when the story focuses on the academics and the mountaineering tourists. Her other asset is an often indulgent and wry British humor notably when dealing with Price and his backward social skills. There was one physical description of Price's smile ("revealing pearly dentures, which was meant to be reassuring, but brought crocodiles to mind") that summoned an image of the wickedly acerbic Beatrice Bradley, often called Mrs. Croc in the mystery novels of Gladys Mitchell.

Another remarkable feature of the book is Cannan's obsession with mountaineering poetry.  Apparently there is a very scarce volume of such poems -- The Englishman in the Alps edited by Sir Arnold Lunn (1913) -- she dipped into for repeated obscure literary allusions.  And I of course had to look up every last one of them!  Francis Worthington, his climbing partner Sebastian, as well as a woman psychologist and one of the elderly dons all spout forth passages from arcane poems and long forgotten works of England's literary past, most of which turn up in Lunn's anthology. One poem "Separation" by Walter Savage Landor is often quoted (" Between us now the mountains and the wood/Seem standing darker than last year stood").  Other poets quoted include A. D. Godley, Thomas Macaulay's "The Lays of Ancient Rome" and the initialed near anonymous author known only as B. K. whose "Levavi Oculos" serves as the source for another oft repeated phrase ("Grant I may pass with strength undimmed and find/The sleep that is more ancient than the hills.")

Speaking of hills, the phrase "the hills sleep on in their eternity" crops up a couple of times. Not only is it an allusion to the poem "Friendship" by Hartley Coleridge, but those familiar with Cannan's bibliography may catch that it is a reference to one of her earliest works The Hills Sleep On (1937), a borderline crime novel.

And if her love of undistinguished mountain poetry was not enough allusion play Cannan also has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge kind of scene in which she makes fun of herself.  Price visits Worthington's sometime mistress Lady Nollis and while waiting for the woman to be summoned by her servants he peruses the titles of her bookshelf. There he finds a miniature library of children's books with the titles like I Wanted a Pony, They Bought Her a Pony, and Plenty of Ponies.  In addition to her mainstream novels and crime fiction Joanna Cannan is probably best known for her pony books written for young girls (and perhaps a few boys). Those titles Price discovered on Lady's Nollis' bookshelves are genuine books written by Cannan and her two daughters, Christine & Diane Pullein-Thompson, who also became writers of horse and pony books.

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Reading Challenge update:  E6 on the Golden Age Bingo Card - "A Book You Have to Borrow."  I took this one out of the Chicago Public Library.

IN BRIEF: The Youth Hostel Murders - Glyn Carr

Abercrombie Lewker, a garrulous, somewhat pompous Shakespearean actor and avid mountain climber is one of the more unusual amateur sleuths in detective fiction. In his travels and rock climbing adventures he inadvertently stumbles across violent deaths that invariably turn out to be nasty murders.

Here, in the third book in the series Lewker's annoying, very artificial speech is considerably diluted from his debut in Death on Milehigh Buttress which I never finished because of the arch dialogue. Lewker has an irritating habit of peppering his speech with quotes from Shakespeare, Webster, Wilde, Shaw and other classic writers of the British stage. But I muddled through the first three chapters of this one and the engrossing story overshadowed all the dialogue eccentricities.

The story includes witchcraft, Welsh legends and lore, and hidden cache of paintings. I figured this one out very early on, but the rock climbing and the character contrast between the youthful suspects and the middle-aged Lewker made for a good read nonetheless.

Most of the good books in this series, including this title, have been reissued by Rue Morgue Press. One of their reissues - Death under Snowdon - is a book that is practically impossible to find in its original edition. A handful of the other Lewker books (not reissued by RMP) are also very scarce and fetch exorbitant prices in the used book trade.

Last year I reviewed Lewker in Tirol, one of the later books in the series. The post can be found here along with the full bibliography of the Abercrombie Lewker series.

Crime Fiction on a EuroPass: Tirol

I hear yodeling, I smell amazing chocolate and baked goods, and I see mountains. They must be the snow covered, jagged peaks of the Austrian Alps. We have arrived in Austria - more specifically the state of Tirol, home of the grandest of the Austrian Alps. Hope you've brought along your ice axe, a warm anorak, sturdy rope and your crampons. We are in for some challenging and deadly mountain climbing in the pages of Lewker in Tirol by Glyn Carr.

When Abercombie Lewker's beloved vintage auto suffers an accident at the hands of a reckless lorry driver he takes "the Dowager" in for hopeful repairs. The mechanic gives him bad news. She's a goner. Then the mechanic, Ted Pirner, starts talking of his hobby as a mountaineering guide. He's looking forward to a trip to Austria, to be exact his parents' home province of South Tirol. Lewker becomes nostalgic for his more active globetrotting days and his own mountain climbing adventures, most of which included some unfortunate murders and some amateur sleuthing. A discussion with Georgie, his wife, and a fellow thespian in his acting troupe decides him to make one last climb. And so he heads off to climb the Zuckerhütl in the Stubai Alps of southeastern Austrian.

Technically, he begins in Italian territory and will cross over into Austria. For we soon learn of some interesting history about Tirol -- how it was split back in 1915 and the southernmost portion annexed to Italy. At the end of WW2 the Austrians were hoping that it would be returned to them, but somehow it was utterly overlooked at the treaty talks, though Italy and Austria worked out an arrangement to recognize the rights of the German speaking population that remained in South Tirol. But a rivalry bordering on hatred still exists at the time of the novel's action and there are signs of dangerous activism intermingled with terrorism.

Zuckerhütl, 3,505 metres (11,499 feet) The highest peak of the Stubai Alps

The Junge Adler (Young Eagles), a German speaking activist group who oppose the still valid annexation of South Tirol to Italy, are becoming violent. Bombs have been set off in the mountains, shootings have taken place at mountaineering parties. All of this in order that attention be drawn to the Junge Adler's cause of returning South Tirol to Austria. Lewker is warned of this activity prior to his setting foot on his tour. His guide, Josef Herkomer, was the most recent victim of these attacks. Josef assures Lewker he will be safe. He cannot imagine another attack would take place so soon. Little do they know.

The mountain climbing sections are intricately described. The climate, the terrain, the history are all neatly woven into the action sequences. We also get the inside dope on a rivalry that exists between Josef and Mario Papi, an Italian guide who happens to be in love with Josef's daughter. This can only mean trouble in a crime novel. When another shooting occurs and one of the guides is wounded in the mountains we know that perhaps there is something a little more than terrorist activity going on in the Alps. Lewker does a fine job of sorting out just who is trying to do in whom. When the expected fatality does occur he offers his assistance to the local police and gets to the bottom of the criminal activity.

Showell Styles, AKA Glyn Carr

"Glyn Carr" is in reality writer Frank Showell Styles, an avid mountaineer himself. Under his own name he has written several non-fiction books on the sport, two series of nautical adventure fiction, and a few espionage thrillers that sometimes incorporate mountain climbing in the plot. In his guise as "Glyn Carr" (a clever pun in Welsh) he created Shakespearean actor, mountaineer and amateur detective Abercrombie Lewker, or "Filthy" as his friends and wife call him. While most of Lewker's adventures are confined to his homeland of Wales he has traveled to Norway, Switzerland, France, Majorca, and even Nepal in his pursuit of his favorite sport and avocation of crime solving.

Several of the Glyn Carr books have been reissued by Rue Morgue Press and are marked with an asterisk in the bibliography at the end of this article. Lewker in Tirol is, however, not one of the reissued titles.

And what's a visit to Austria without some local music? Here are Die Mayrhofner singing about the Zillertal, their home, which is not actually featured in Carr's book but it's in the same Bundesland of Tirol.




For other visits to Austria and more criminal depictions in its gorgeous surroundings be sure to visit Mysteries in Paradise, our host blog for this whirlwind trip through Europe.

The Abercrombie Lewker detective novels

*Death on Milestone Buttress (1951)
*Murder on the Matterhorn (1951)
*The Youth Hostel Murders (1952)
The Corpse in the Crevasse (1952)
*Death under Snowdon (1954)
A Corpse at Camp Two (1955)
Murder of an Owl (1956)
Swing Away, Climber (1956)
The Ice Axe Murders (1958)
Holiday with Murder (1960)
*Death Finds a Foothold (1961)
Lewker in Norway (1963)
Death of a Weirdy (1965)
Lewker in Tirol (1967)
Fat Man's Agony (1969)