Erik Amdrup was director of surgical gastro-enterology and professor of surgery at Aarus Kommune Hospital, Denmark. He was born on 21 February 1923. His PhD thesis in 1960 was on the dumping syndrome. Later he developed a method of 'precise antrectomy' to avoid that complication and carried out research into the effect of vagotomy on parietal cell function, work which led to the Arhus county vagotomy trial. This won him international fame, the Novo Nordisk prize in 1977 and the *Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology* Prize for 1987. As a supervisor of research he was an unpretentious and highly regarded teacher, and published (together with J F Rehfeld) *Gastrins and the vagus* (London, Academic Press, 1979). In addition he had another career as an author of detective novels, several of which were made into films. Some of his short stories made their way into anthologies alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. Erik Amdrup died on 22 February 1998, the day after his 75th birthday.