Dead Men Don’t Ski
– Patricia Moyes
In the first Inspector Henry Tibbett Mystery published in
1959, Henry and his wife Emmy take a vacation at a ski resort in the Italian
Alps near the Austrian border. It’s in fact working vacation because his
superiors in Scotland Yard have asked Henry to be on the lookout for
drug-smugglers.
As in the second novel starring Tibbet, Down among the Dead Men, a seemingly accidental
death has already occurred before the novel actually gets started. That is, one
of the ski instructors ended up in a crevasse because of too much risk-taking.
But another hotel guest, detested by about everybody who
had contact with him, is discovered shot dead on the ski lift. Henry joins a local copper and greenhorn Spezzi to investigate the murder.
Moyes likes to set her mysteries in different locations,
such as Geneva (Death on
the Agenda) and a London movie set (Falling
Star). Like a cozy writer usually does , she employs stock characters: the bright young thing, the good
guy with the dodgy past, the Lord Peter type, the mysterious woman, the
emotional foreigner, the dumb colonel, the hideous Hun, etc. Henry and Emmy are
reassuringly normal – no existential angst on them and Henry’s preternatural intuition
(his “nose”) isn’t weird.
Moyes also has a Simenonion sense of the closed
community, such as the locals versus the tourists and the local commercial
fishers versus the weekend boaters (again Down among the Dead Men). Finally,
though I’m not astute when it comes to puzzles, she unfolds the incidents smoothly
with only a couple of too obvious techniques “to make ‘em wait,” as Wilkie
Collins urged. This one, unexpectedly, did not have draggy spots although
it goes almost 300 pages, long for a mystery in my book.
All in all, a strong effort for a first novel and well
worth reading.
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