The Lonely Skier

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Hammond Innes

Dedication

Title Page

Introduction

1. A Journey to the Dolomites

2. A ‘Slittovia' is Auctioned

3. Murder for Two

4. My Shroud is Driven Snow

5. Back Across the Glacier

6. An Ugly Scene

7. The Story of the Gold

8. We Dig Our Own Grave

9. Col da Varda in Flames

10. The Lonely Skier

Copyright

Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, on 15 July 1913 and educated at Cranbrook School, Kent. He left school aged eighteen, and worked successively in publishing, teaching and journalism. In 1936, in need of money in order to marry, he wrote a supernatural thriller,
The Doppelganger
, which was published in 1937 as part of a two-year, four-book deal. In 1939 Innes moved to a different publisher, and began to write compulsively, continuing to publish throughout his service in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War.

Innes travelled widely to research his novels and always wrote from personal experience – his 1940s novels
The Blue Ice
and
The White South
were informed by time spent working on a whaling ship in the Antarctic, while
The Lonely Skier
came out of a post-war skiing course in the Dolomites. He was a keen and accomplished sailor, which passion inspired his 1956 bestseller
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
. The equally successful 1959 film adaptation of this novel enabled Innes to buy a large yacht, the
Mary Deare
, in which he sailed around the world for the next fifteen years, accompanied by his wife and fellow author Dorothy Lang.

Innes wrote over thirty novels, as well as several works of non-fiction and travel journalism. His thrilling stories of spies, counterfeiters, black markets and shipwreck earned him both literary acclaim and an international following, and in 1978 he was awarded a CBE. Hammond Innes died at his home in Suffolk on 10 June 1998.

Air Bridge

Atlantic Fury

Attack Alarm

Campbell's Kingdom

Dead and Alive

Delta Connection

Golden Soak

High Stand

Isvik

Killer Mine

Levkas Man

Maddon's Rock

Medusa

North Star

Solomons Seal

Target Antarctica

The Angry Mountain

The Big Footprints

The Black Tide

The Blue Ice

The Doomed Oasis

The Land God Gave to Cain

The Last Voyage

The Strange Land

The Strode Venturer

The Trojan Horse

The White South

The Wreck of the Mary Deare

Wreckers Must Breathe

To
PETER WILSON

 

This book will, I hope, recall many pleasant memories of places we have visited together. And because its setting is the Dolomites, it will particularly remind you of a little
albergo
near the Ponte nelle Alpi where we met for a drink. You were on your way up to Cortina. I was coming down from Cortina to Venice.

Aldbourne
, 1946.

 

The Second World War provided both the inspiration and the readership for a new wave of British thriller writers, of whom Hammond Innes was one. He and others such as Alistair MacLean, and later Ian Fleming, drew on their wartime experiences to set new standards of accuracy in their depiction of places and in the technical details underpinning their stories. They were writing at first for a predominantly male audience who to one degree or another shared those wartime experiences and demanded authenticity, a fast pace and hints of glamour not easily come by in the immediate post-war world. It was a readership facing unemployment and the very real possibility of a renewed World War. Perhaps that helps to explain an epic, almost fearful, element in Hammond Innes's writing, which it retained throughout his long career – he published his last novel in 1992.

Hammond Innes was the first of the new generation out of the trap. He had published several thrillers before the war and he wrote two more during the war, while he was serving in the Royal Artillery. None had attracted much critical attention, though he had shown what he could do in
Wreckers Must Breathe
, published in 1940 just before he joined the army. But it was not until 1947 and the publication of
The Lonely Skier
that he began to achieve favourable notice, and from then on his feet were set firmly on the path that would lead to his becoming the most wide-ranging and the longest lasting of all the post-war thriller writers. Four of his early books, including
The Lonely Skier
, were made into films, but it was not until he published his masterpiece,
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
, in 1956 that he joined the ranks of the super-best-sellers and could buy his own ocean-going yacht to scour the world for new scenery and plots – and also to discover a new ‘green' philosophy.

The Lonely Skier
is not the classic tale of adventure that its title might suggest. Its main character, Neil Blair, who performs the role of commentator on the action, is an ordinary man who finds himself in an extraordinary situation. Demobbed, unemployed and penniless, he stumbles on a job with the vaguest of briefs: to go to a mountain hut, a rifigio on Col da Varda above Cortina in the Italian Dolomites, to pretend to be writing a film script and to watch and report what happens. He finds himself cooped up in the rifigio, to which the only access is via a ‘slittovia', a dodgy-sounding cable sleigh, with an assorted bunch of suspicious-looking Europeans. Who are they and why are they there? This is not so much a whodunnit as a who-dun what and why? The tale develops out of past relationships, only gradually disclosed to the reader, coupled with a good deal of retrospective wartime skulduggery, with the hero when he eventually arrives acting as a catalyst, forcing the situation into the open.

If this sounds like a plot that Agatha Christie might have produced, I am doing it a grave injustice. It is far more than that. This plot is woven from the torn fabric of post-war Europe. As one of the characters observes, it is ‘a strange, sick Europe . . . Beyond men and women here who have grown fat on war, there is a vast human jungle . . . It is the survival of the fittest.' Hammond Innes creates a small piece of that human jungle inside the rifigio.

The ordinary man who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances is a theme beloved of one of Hammond Innes's contemporaries, writing just before the war, Eric Ambler. But whereas Ambler sets his plots in the throbbing heat of the Côte d'Azur, Hammond Innes chooses for this novel the freezing snowfields, glaciers and high passes of the Dolomites. It is not only the human jungle that has to be confronted and conquered but the mighty forces of nature. The idea of man versus nature is a constant theme in Innes's stories. In
Wreckers Must Breathe
it is the subterranean world of caves – the silence, the darkness and the risks of flooding and subsidence – that must be faced. Often, as in
The Blue Ice,
published a year after
The Lonely Skier
, it is the sea in all its moods. But in
The Lonely Skier
it is the sea's opposite, the mountains, and all the fearful difficulties and obs-tacles that high altitudes can produce and that man must overcome by skill, perseverance and daring.

Though his attitudes and concerns were to change and become wider with the expansion of his readership and the trend of world events, Innes continued to be fascinated by the idea of man confronted by the forces of nature. But in his attitude to that struggle he eventually switched sides. In the earlier books, and
The Lonely Skier
is one example, it is heroic for man to face nature's obstacles and overthrow them through his human qualities as well as his skill. Later in his life, Innes saw Man as ‘a rogue species and doomed', a violent creature whose ‘will to conquer is invincible' but whose egotism and greed are destroying the balances of nature. ‘Man is a killer and he carries the seed of his own destruction', and ‘the world seems to be shrieking aloud at the cruelty of humans'. His later heroes have the task of exposing, challenging and resisting the consequences of follies to which they themselves are prone. And all along, in the earlier as well as in the later books, the hero is a lonely man driven by a mission in the course of which he self-destructs.

Nor are Innes's heroes all particularly nice people. The true hero in
The Lonely Skier
is not Neil Blair, the ordinary man; Blair is instead the observer, the commentator. The hero is the man who gives him the job, Engles, a former British Military Intelligence officer. Engles could be ‘a cruel, sneering devil', cool, insolent to his friends and enemies alike, and incidentally, with a style rather too direct for a spy. His savoir faire is impeccable, but he himself confesses that ‘pride . . . and my insatiable desire for excitement' are what drive him on. His upper lip remains at all times stiff: ‘I didn't mean to land you in a mess like this. Make no mistake about it, Neil – we're in a pretty tight spot' – rather an understatement in the context. A whole phalanx of fictional British heroes from Richard Hannay to Dick Barton would have applauded the words, though they would not have approved of Innes's habit of killing his heroes.

Though women play a quite considerable part in his dramas, on the whole, Innes's heroes are misogynists and his narrators, who, as in
The Lonely Skier
, are usually distinct from the heroes, are only marginally less so. In
The Blue Ice
the narrator actually marries, or at least lives with a woman who fully shares his perils, just as Innes's own wife shared his wanderings about the oceans in search of locations for his plots. Carla, the only significant woman in
The Lonely Skier
, is a nasty piece of work – ‘all of a man's baser thoughts come true' – who gets her come-uppance at the hands of her serially murderous lover. In other respects she resembles other of Innes's female characters in having too wide a mouth for conventional good looks. Readers looking for feminine interest or steamy sex will be disappointed.

His real love is landscape and seascape both in its grand sweep and in the vivid depiction of its tiny appearances.
The Lonely Skier
is full of both: the ‘wind . . . took hold of the trees and shook them like a terrier shakes a rat. The snow fell in great slabs from their whipping branches . . . the wind . . . driving the snowflakes almost horizontal to the ground'. His scenes of skiing and sailing are wholly convincing in the same accurate, mind-catching detail of their small touches, and also in their treatment of natural phenomena and scenery in all their awesome majesty. Up in the high pass ‘the dark peaks jostled one another, battling to be the first to pierce the heavens, and all about them their snow skirts dropped away to the world below, the nice comfortable world where human beings lived.'