The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky

After tragedy befalls a guest, hotelier Alex Snevar renames his lodge The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn. The mountaineer’s room is preserved and his belongings displayed. Curious noises and inexplicable phenomena suggest the lodge is haunted... Well, ghost stories are always good for business.

The coup is that by the end the reader is persuaded to believe the most extraordinary solution.

Then an avalanche traps the guests at the unlucky lodge and a corpse is discovered. A locked room mystery in a locked location begins . . . No one can get out. No one can get in.

Luckily, the strong arm of the law is already there.

Under the mismanagement of holidaying Police Inspector Glebksy, an investigation begins. Among the guests are a femme fatale and her drunk husband, a man who climbs walls, a magician, a sulky teenager, and a small-time gangster. Also padding the halls is a peculiarly intelligent Saint Bernard.

Inspector Glebsky’s challenge is not only to unravel the mystery, but to consider under what circumstances the letter of the law might be circumnavigated. The book’s coup is that by the end the reader is persuaded to believe the most extraordinary solution, defying the first-person narrator.

“Have you seen my perpetual motion machines?”

“No. Do they work?”

“Sometimes.” (35)

There are humorous moments, but for the most part, I struggled to connect with The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn. The women are routinely dismissed as dumb or idiots, and the detective has a distasteful obsession with the teenage character.

The highlights are the tone, the location, and the detective’s confusion. The way in which the reader peels away from the narrator is a neat, interesting trick and a subversion of Golden Age detective norms.