The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes
Updated: 6 days ago
A chase across the avalanches of the Italian Dolomites, The Lonely Skier is an exciting tale well told.
It's 1947, and Neil Blair is recently demobilized, looking for work in London. He runs into an acquaintance, Derek Engles, who is now making films. He offers Neil a job to write a film script on location in Cortina, but actually to observe and report on the few other guests at the mountaintop lodge 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 soon meets the other guests: Edouardo Mancini, looking to purchase the lodge at 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 backstories and common histories, which Neil and Derek must discover. There is a hair-raising section where Mayne abandons Neil on a mountain ski path 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 snowbound until the storm has passed.
I was hoping for intrigue and danger, and found it in The Lonely Skier. The characters were tough and well drawn with 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.
This was filmed in 1948 as Snowbound, available to watch free online.
A great spy thriller from Hammond Innes, and a treat to discover.
Hammond Innes also wrote the wartime ship mystery The Wreck of the Mary Deare.
1947 / Paperback / 192 pages
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