The Lonely Skier

Hammond Innes was writing spy thrillers at much the same time as Eric Ambler and Helen MacInnes were. I know I’ve overlooked his books in the past due to lurid covers but this elegant Vintage Classics cover drew me in. I’m totally ok with judging books by their covers! Well, the full story is that I picked this up and looked at it in Waterstones whilst Darren was wandering around picking out a selection of books for me to choose from to give to him for his birthday present. So I put it back on the display as I didn’t want to buy books for myself that day. But then it turned out to be one of the books in the pile he handed to me to select from, so that seemed to be a sign to buy it for him! And so he read it, liked it, and passed it on to me to read.

This story sees Neil Blair, an out of work writer, sent to a ski resort by a film director who wants him to write a script for a skiing thriller, except that’s just a cover for checking out the residents and looking out for a woman called Carla, the former girlfriend of a Nazi war criminal. The setting is Cortina in the Italian Dolomites, which was one of the cities hosting the 2026 Winter Olympics earlier this year and I got a kick out of having that connection to draw on as I read.

The book was published in 1948 and whilst the story mostly holds up alright I was disappointed that Carla was about the only female character featured (there was a maid too but I can’t recall anyone else). It was very much a boys own adventure story with some rather clunky plot devices but a couple of really funny deadpan humour scenes as well. I enjoyed some bits more than others, it wasn’t a bad read, but not a great one either. At only 176 pages it didn’t overstay it’s welcome; I think one of the things I appreciate about a lot of older books over modern ones (and obviously it’s not universal) is that they seem to have been allowed to be the length they need to be and not the length the contract says they should be.