Hammond Innes also wrote The Wreck of the Mary Deare, a wartime ship mystery that I review next. Somehow, my hands picked up The Lonely Skier instead, and it was an exciting tale well told.
My paperback edition has this intriguing cover: A chase across the avalanches of the Italian Dolomites, with a man protecting a woman in the snowbank, both in indoor clothing, from an unknown danger, which doesn't happen in this novel.
Looks exciting though.
It's 1947 and Neil Blair is recently demobilized, looking for work in London. He runs into Derek Engles, and acquaintance who is now making films. He offers Neil a job to write a film script and on location in Cortina, but actually to observe and report on the few other guests at the mountain top lodge named Col de Varda. Built on top of the machine house for a slittovia (a cable drawn funicular sleigh), the lodge was the scene many years ago where a German convoy of gold disappeared. Neil and a film location scout soon meet the other guests; Edouardo Mancini, looking to purchase the lodge in an auction; Stefan Valdini, a nattily dressed Sicilian gangster; Contessa Forelli, really a prostitute named Carla; Kereminos, formerly of Greek intelligence; and Gabriel Mayne, an expert skier in a white suit with a yellow scarf.
They are all liars with hidden back stories and common histories, which Neil (and the late arriving Derek) must discover. There is a hair raising section where Mayne abandons Neil on a ski path over a mountain range to another town, crossing the Cristallino glacier in a building snowstorm - was it a way to lose him forever? Back at the refugio, tensions mount as motives are revealed and the guests are forced to remain snowbound until the storm has passed. The characters were tough and well drawn and there is genuine tension and danger, ski chases, hidden Nazi gold, a whiteout snowstorm, escapes and murders - all set over the noisy slittovia machine house with its grinding motor and tightening cables. A dynamite setting.
I was hoping for intrigue and danger, and found it in The Lonely Skier. The story was narrated by Neil, and at the end of the novel he sets down the events as the film script he was hired to write. Art spills over into real life as it was filmed in 1948 as Snowbound, which I was happy to find for free on YouTube.
A great spy thriller from Hammond Innes, and a treat to discover.
1947 / Paperback / 192 pages
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