Never get into an argument with your wife, especially after the pair of you have eaten too much tripe and onions. If you do, you might end up, like Sir Abercrombie Lewker, on a mountaineering trip in Snowdonia with a group of fellow members of the Foothills Club that you barely know.

Betrand Awdrey, the host, seems to have invited an number of people to the weekend who have a grudge against him, but the next day, the party sets out to explore the private crags that are part of Awdrey’s estate. But those crags have worrying names; Fat Man’s Agony and Suicide Wall, for example. You’d think that naming climbs thusly would be tempting fate, wouldn’t you? And you’d be right…

I’ve had this on my shelf for a while, as it’s the last of the Abercrombie Lewker mysteries and I was planning to read the series in order, but when I’m limping round the house with a walking stick borrowed from my mother-in-law after tearing a muscle in my thigh, the title just seemed unavoidable. After all, I’ve already read Miles Burton’s Not A Leg To Stand On.

So a quick recap – Showell Styles wrote a lot of books, a significant number of which involve someone climbing a mountain. Of these, three featured superspy Gideon “The Poet” Hazel, and his compatriot in espionage Abercrombie Lewker. Following those, Styles, under the Glyn Carr pseudonym, wrote fifteen traditional mysteries – the first three are adventure stories – with Lewker as the lead detective (and no sign of The Poet). Here’s Styles, by the way.

Five of these books have been reprinted by the Rue Morgue Press, but they’re not that easy to find. The other ten – well, there are copies out there, but they’re not cheap. In this time of the revival of the classic crime era, Lewker is ripe for a reprint because these books, are, quite frankly, rather wonderful.

This was the last one of the series – Styles carried on writing for years after this, but decided apparently that he had run out of ways to kill someone on a mountain. While that might not be exactly true, it is possible that he had run out of original plot structures. The central idea here isn’t as clever as some of the others that he wrote and while I can’t quite put my finger on it, I’m pretty sure that he’s used it in an earlier book.

Having said that, it’s still a great book. The build-up to the murder is engrossing, with some nice character work and the settings are beautifully described. There’s a decent and rather subtle misdirection – maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it’s pretty clever if it was intended – and plenty of suspicion abounding. Lewker is as fun a lead as ever and I reckon there was still life in the old dog yet. But all credit to Styles for bringing the stories to an end in such (ahem) style…