Death Goes On Skis

The green Virago Classics spine of this book stood out among the crime books in the Oxfam bookshop. Crime fiction all seems to come in one of three styles of standard cover these days. I’m not sure why publishers think we’ll only buy books if they look like other books! Probably for the same reason Aldi only think we’ll buy their chocolate bars if we mistake them for big brand name ones. I certainly do judge books by their covers but I’d rather have something more original to judge.

Anyway this was a great cover and I picked the book up. I’d never heard of Nancy Spain before and she definitely seems like an interesting character. Unfortunately I suspect reading her biography is more interesting than reading her fiction. This is the fourth in a series of comic crime novels and was published in 1949. Sandi Toksvig’s introduction is great and she manages not to spoil the book during it.

In the beginning of the book the characters are all assembling on a sleeper train to the alps and it reminded me more of Enid Blyton characters heading to boarding school rather than anything else. Unfortunately this runs a lot longer than Blyton and on a less interesting plot. As expected in a crime novel characters die regularly in suspicious ways and other characters investigate their deaths. I was never quite sure whether some characters were behaving badly for humorous reasons or whether the book was just conveying outdated attitudes, or in fact whether the author was poking fun at attitudes that ought to be outdated, I think/hope it was at least a bit of the last. Similarly the plot wandered and it took me way too long to work out that some things were supposed to be farcical and not just ridiculous.

The most badly drawn of the characters was Miriam Birdseye who I think is Spain’s ongoing detective character who didn’t even get an intro on the train so she just seemed to parachute in (not literally though she might as well have done). As far as I could see she did no detecting, but again, perhaps that’s part of the humour. Who knows? Not me and I probably won’t be trying another from this series to find out.