Dead Men Don't Ski

Henry stopped climbing and stood stock-still, just in the shadow of the trees, and watched, with a terrible fascination. Little by little, foot by foot, the pursuer seemed to be gaining ground on his quarry. Then the slim black figure of the leading skier accelerated, as though propelled by some superhuman force of desperation, and the distance bet

The Baron interrupted. “Kindly speak in German,” he said. Red-faced, Spezzi began again. “I would gladly have spared you this unpleasant interview, Baroness, but the fact that you were on the chair-lift at the crucial time makes it—” “I know, I know. Let’s have the questions,” said Maria-Pia, in Italian. Spezzi mopped his brow, and continued, dogge

His face was long, and creased with deep lines of intolerance, and his lean, vulpine features were crowned incongruously by a green Tyrolean hat.

Emmy always remembered the scene that followed as a sort of El Greco tableau. The lean, cadaverous figure of Carlo, his long face creased into vertical lines of distress, lit sharply by the stark glare of the single bulb in the cabin: the skeletal shapes of the empty chairs as they clattered on their way: the huddled figure lying motionless in the

Henry Tibbett was not a man who looked like a great detective. In fact, as he would be the first to point out, he was not a great detective, but a conscientious and observant policeman, with an occasional flair for intuitive detection which he called “my nose”. There were very few of his superiors who were not prepared to listen, and to take approp

For the next few minutes Henry trotted between luggage, porter, and ticket office like a flustered but conscientious mother bird intent on satisfying her brood’s craving for worms—the worms in this case being those cryptic bits of paper which railway officials delight to stamp, perforate, clip, and shake their heads over.

The other youth did not quite achieve the standard of physical perfection set by the rest of the party—he was tall and thin, with a beak of a nose and dark hair that was rather too long—but he made up for it by the dazzling appearance of his clothes. His trousers, skin-tight, were pale blue, like a Ruritanian officer’s in a musical comedy: his swea

Far up the mountain, where the trees thinned out, just on the dividing line between sunshine and shadow, was a single, isolated building, as dwarfed by its surroundings as a fly drowning in a churn of milk. “The Bella Vista,” said the Colonel, almost reverently. There was a silence. “I didn’t realise it was so far up,” said Emmy at last, in a small

As they had all realised in their loneliness on Innsbruck station, the English and Americans have not yet discovered Italy as a winter sports’ country. No other English voices greeted them.