To my shame, I’d never heard of the Strugatsky Brothers until a Russian friend mentioned them five years ago, but I’ve since read two of their books, the more eerie Roadside Picnic (inspiration for the film Stalker) and the surreal satire of Monday Starts on Saturday. So imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that they’ve also written a sort-of locked room murder mystery, that Kaggsy had reviewed it on her blog and that she was willing to send me a copy of it. Especially since it fits the remit of the #1970Club this week, and I was afraid that I had nothing on my shelves published that year.
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, published in Russian in 1970, this English edition (translated by Josh Billings) published by Melville House in 2015.
A good way to describe this novel would be the films Knives Out or Clue meets Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge or The Judge and His Hangman. There is a lot of fun to be had with parading and spoofing all the crime fiction tropes, but there’s also a real sense of underlying anxiety and the lack of certainty what it means to ‘do the right thing’ in a world with few moral guidelines.
It starts off as a fairly typical crime story. Inspector Glebsky arrives at the Dead Mountaineer’s Inn high up in the mountains, beyond the aptly named Bottleneck Pass, for a bit of a rest (and a lot of skiing), on leave from his job investigating forgeries, fraud and embezzlement, all those white-collar crimes. The inn is ‘two stories high, a yellowish-green color, with a mournful-looking sign hanging over the front proch’. The owner seems sluggish and melancholy as well, apparently turning the room of the mountaineer who died on the nearby peek (and hence gave his name to the inn) into a short of shrine. So much for gloomy foreshadowing and Jamaica Inn type atmosphere!
Then we have the motley crew of guests: the mad scientist, the ebullient magician with his nephew (or should that be niece?), the wealthy eccentric and his beautiful wife, a nervous weaselly man and a late arrival, a tall and magnificent Viking. Let’s not forget the delectable maid Kasia, who seems to catch the eye of all the male guests, and is described as a ‘dumpling’ and thought to be a fool (although, in the end, I begin to wonder if she’s not the only sane and sensible person there).
There seem to be some strange goings-on at the inn which might almost make the reader feel they’re reading a ghost story: things disappearing, people being where they’re not supposed to be, occupied showers, water running where it shouldn’t be and so on. Then a murder occurs and an avalanche blocks the only access to the valley. So they are stuck in the inn with a murderer on the loose.
So far so conventional, one might think, despite the slight hint of the supernatural. But then the story gets really strange. I don’t want to spoil it for people, but suffice it to say that fantasy, supernatural and sci fi elements all creep in, leading to a dramatic showdown and chase across the snow. And quite a bit of soul-searching for Inspector Glebsky, or of self-justification after the fact, since he is the one narrating the story.
The words the innkeeper says right at the beginning in his conversation with Glebsky seems to be an excellent key to the whole approach to this novel:
Haven’t you ever noticed how much more interesting the unknown is than the known? The unknown makes us think – it makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought. It beckons, it promises. It’s like a fire flickering in the depths of the night. But as soon as the unknown becomes known, it’s just as flat, gray and uninteresting as everything else.
Another aspect of the novel that I really enjoyed was the obvious love of skiing and the freedom that Glebsky feels when he puts on his skis and skims across the snow. This could be describing any sudden burst of freedom from the everyday, especially when the everyday might bring surveillance or censorship. It certainly describes the exhilaration I feel when I’m skiing.
I took a few hops to test the ski binding, and then sped off with a whoop in the direction of the sun. I increased my pace gradually, squinting from the glare and from pleasure, throwing off with every breath I exhaled the boredom of smoke-filled offices, musty papers, teary perps and grumpy bosses, the stale jokes and tedious political arguments, my wife’s petty bustling, the demands of the younger generation… With every breath I left myself further behind… left the tightly wound moralist who followed every law to the last letter, the man whose shirt buttons shone… I was overjoyed to feel all this leaving me, I hoped that it would never return, that from this point forward everything would be light, elastic, crystal-clear…
If I were to rate the comedy in this book, I’d say it’s somewhere in-between the crazy farce of Monday Starts on Saturday and the unsettling Roadside Picnic. There are some slapstick moments, but also some gentler fun being poked at the narrator and the other guests, for example when describing the drunken philosophizing conversation taking place between the innkeeper and the inspector at midnight, or the scientist playing billiards with the inspector. Above all, it feels to me like it’s pushing the envelope on the crime novel as far as it will go, testing its elasticity, and ends up being quite a different beast.
I’m proud to be able to take part in the #1970Club hosted by Karen and Simon, do go and see the reviews of all the other great books published that year.
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