Crossed Skis Read online




  This edition published 2020 by

  The British Library

  96 Euston Road

  London NW1 2DB

  Crossed Skis was originally published in 1952 by Collins, London

  Crossed Skis © 1952 The Estate of Carol Carnac

  Introduction © 2020 Martin Edwards

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 7123 5331 1

  eISBN 978 0 7123 6761 5

  Front cover image © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science & Society Picture Library

  Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

  Contents

  Introduction

  Crossed Skis

  ‌Introduction

  Crossed Skis, originally published in 1952 under the legendary imprint of the Collins Crime Club, is the first Carol Carnac novel to be published by the British Library. But Carol Carnac was a pen-name of Edith Caroline Rivett, who is already familiar to fans of the Crime Classics series under her original pseudonym, E.C.R. Lorac. The author was known to family and friends as Carol (and Lorac is Carol, spelt backwards).The Lorac books feature Inspector Macdonald, whereas the usual lead detective in the Carnac novels is another likeable Scotland Yard man, Julian Rivers.

  When this book first appeared, Carol (it seems simplest to refer to her by that name) was in her late fifties but an enthusiastic skier. Indeed, she dedicated the novel to her fifteen fellow members of a ski-ing party at the Austrian mountain resort of Lech am Arlberg in January 1951 “with thanks for their help and advice, and happy memories of their charming company. May they never Cross their Skis.”

  Carol frequently used thinly disguised versions of real people, names, places, and events in her fiction. Crossed Skis illustrates this technique, since it concerns the misadventures of a party of eight men and eight women who travel to—Lech am Arlberg, for the ski-ing. Crime writers who fictionalise people whom they know are taking a risk (especially if they base their murderers on their own acquaintances) but this is a book which derives an important part of its appeal from the authenticity of the background. Carol’s particular strength as a writer lay in her ability to capture the atmosphere of a place. Examples in the Lorac canon include Devon (Fire in the Thatch), London (Bats in the Belfry) and Lunesdale in north Lancashire (Fell Murder). Here she conveys the excitement of the skiers and the beauty of the Alps with her customary skill as well as with the benefit of first-hand experience.

  One of the main characters in the book, and the oldest member of the ski-ing party, is Catherine Reid, known as Kate. It doesn’t seem unduly speculative to suggest that Kate is in essence a self-portrait. There are several clues in the text; for instance, we’re told at the start that Kate wants to paint during the holiday, and Carol was an accomplished artist. Kate “was interested in all human beings”, like her creator, and during the course of the story she also indulges her instinct for amateur detection.

  Crossed Skis is a book in which two distinct storylines gradually converge. Once we have been introduced to the ski-ing party, the scene switches to Bloomsbury. After a fire at a decaying boarding-house, a man’s body is found. Inspector Brook, a detective at the scene, is puzzled by an impression in the mud, before realising that it is the same size and shape as the ring and point made by a ski-stick – “a very characteristic mark: once you’d seen it you remembered it.” But what connection can this incident possibly have with ski-ing? He reports to Chief Inspector Rivers of the C.I.D., who is sure that they are dealing with a murder case. Rivers is a skier (he says of international ski-running “it’s one of the best things I know”), and he is convinced that so is the culprit: “I’ve never been after a skier before. I wonder where he’s gone.”

  The reader will have little doubt that the answer to this question is to be found in Lech am Arlberg, but Carol maintains suspense with conspicuous skill, running the police investigation in tandem with the story of the skiers’ activities on the other side of the Channel. She strikes a pleasing balance between mystification as to the culprit’s identity, description of Rivers’ low-key but relentless methods of detection, and an account of the pleasures of ski-ing which even those who wouldn’t be caught dead on the snow-covered slopes are likely to find engaging.

  The first novel to appear under the Carol Carnac name, Triple Death, was published in 1936. She’d made her debut as Lorac only five years earlier, with The Murder in the Burrows, but ten more Lorac titles were in print by the end of 1936, and she probably adopted the alternative pen-name to avoid giving the impression that she was flooding the market. In all, there were twenty-three Carol Carnac books; the last to be published in her lifetime was Long Shadows, a.k.a. Affair at Helen’s Court (1957) while Death of a Lady Killer appeared posthumously in 1959.

  At the time she wrote Crossed Skis, Carol Rivett was settled happily in the rural village of Aughton in Lunesdale. She had moved there during the war, to be near her sister Maud and her brother-in-law John Howson. Today she is remembered in Lunesdale as someone who loved the local community, and was in turn embraced by it as if she were a native-born countrywoman. Thanks to Lena Whiteley, who knew Carol, I have been given a picture of a typical day in the author’s life. She would do her correspondence in the morning (often receiving fan mail from readers in the US), and take her letters to the post office. In the afternoon, she would garden and let her mind wander as she thought up her stories. In the evening she would bathe, dress for dinner, put on make-up and an evening gown, and often dine on her own, before writing later on.

  She travelled around England, and also went to Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. A sociable woman, she was an active member of the Detection Club, and served for several years as its Secretary. Her fellow crime writers called her “the Lady of the Lizard” because she liked to wear a brooch of a turquoise-spotted lizard with ruby eyes. Her other pastimes included embroidery and art and she had a keen interest in heraldry. She created her own illustrated bookplate and also a logo for the Detection Club which is still in use today. Despite her considerable body of work, and the success which she achieved during her lifetime, her fiction spent decades out of print until the recent resurgence of interest in classic crime fiction led the British Library to be persuaded of the merit of reprinting selected Lorac titles. This particular book seems to be the first Carol Carnac novel to have been reprinted in Britain since her death in 1958. It is a pleasure to welcome the reappearance of a name that has been missing from the bookshop shelves for far too long.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  ‌Crossed Skis

  To our party at Lech am Arlberg, January, 1951

  BARBARA — MICHAEL

  JEAN — MICHAEL

  MARY — TONY

  PATRICIA — DICK

  DIANA — FRANCIS

  MARGARET — GEOFFREY

  JUNE — RICHARD

  JOHN

  With thanks for their help and advice,

  and happy memories of their charming company.

  May they never Cross their Skis.

  CAROL

  Chapter I

  1

  “By the Golden Arrow arch at Victoria Station, continental side, at twelve noon, tomorrow, New Year’s Day, and don’t be late,” said Bridget Manners patiently. “You can’t mistake the Golden Arrow arch, and anyway all the porters know it. Yes, I know the B.B.C. has given gale warnings for Portsmouth, Dover and Thames, but you’ll just have to bear it. Bring your Kwells and don’t be late.”

  She put down the receiver and threw up her arms in a gesture of despair. “Jane, I shall be raving before we start. Everybody’s ringing up all day, as though I hadn’t told them everything. Oh
, Hades, who’s that?”

  “It’s all right. That’ll be Pippa, she’s a sensible wench,” said Jane, as the door bell rang. “She just wants to hear about the last man, and probably to try on her ski-ing trousers. She’s borrowed them and she’s in a panic in case she can’t sit down in them. I’ll go to the door.”

  “And I’ll go and powder my nose—it’s priority,” said Bridget.

  Phillipa Brand (commonly called Pippa), a tall bonny lass in her twenties, came into Bridget’s sitting-room with Jane.

  “I can’t believe it’s true!” she exclaimed. “Do you really think we shall get off tomorrow? I’ve been panicking for weeks. First it was on and then it was off, and it’s just been too hair-raising. Winter sporting! I’ve never wanted to do anything so much, and I simply can’t believe it’s true we’re going.”

  “Well, we are going,” said Jane firmly. “Sixteen of us. Eight men and eight women. Biddy’s got everything taped—tickets, reservations, couchettes and hotel, and she’s worked like a Trojan over it. If anybody falls out now, it’ll be just unforgivable. What with Raymond getting married and Nigel having an appendix and Charles going broke over a new car, it looked as though we should be an eighty per cent hen party. But it’s all right and everything’s in order. Oh lord, that’s the phone again. You try on those bags while I answer it. There’s generally lashings of room in them and you’re not that buxom.”

  “I’m bigger than I look—there,” said Pippa, as Jane lifted the receiver and began to chant: “By the Golden Arrow arch at Victoria Station, continental side, at twelve, noon… oh, it’s Daphne. Yes, I know you know, but we’re just making sure. What? Oh yes, Bridget’s got the last man. Nigel raked him up. Oh, Nigel has got an appendix. Yes, jolly bad luck. Twelve o’clock tomorrow. Cheers.”

  Bridget, with nose duly powdered and curly hair brushed into order, came back into the room. Bridget was very pretty, but her clear-cut face was purposeful, her eyes intelligent as well as beguiling. She gave an expert glance at Pippa’s ski-ing trousers.

  “Hallo, Pippa. Those are all right… quite snappy in fact. Sakes, what a time we’ve had. But I don’t think there can be any more crises now, and I saw Veronica this morning. She said Lech is all one can wish—jolly good ski-ing, not too remote and nice places to dance. So it sounds all right.”

  “It sounds a dream,” said Pippa. “I’ve wanted to ski all my life and now it’s really going to happen. Do tell me about the others. It’s all been changed so often I’ve just lost count.”

  Bridget sat down by the fire. “You know several of them,” she said. “Eight females—you, Jane and me. Catherine Reid, who’s a friend of Jane’s. She wants to paint, I believe. Meriel Parsons—you remember her, she paints, too, and she was on the land during the war. Martha Harris is coming with her brother—he’s a doctor. It’s useful to have a doctor in the party. By the way, have you insured your legs? I have. You never know with ski-ing. Who else? Oh, Jillian Dexter. She’s Ian’s sister and quite a lovely, I’m told. Daphne Melling was in the Wrens with me, and she comes to our Reel parties. That’s all the girls—Jane, Pippa, Catherine, Meriel, Martha, Jillian, Daphne and me. It’ll be simpler to use front names. We can all learn each other’s surnames as we go along.”

  “Do you know them all?” asked Pippa.

  “I know most of the shes and some of the hes,” replied Bridget. “Malcolm Perry’s coming, he’s a schoolmaster and he was ski-ing somewhere last year. Tim Grant’s a pilot, I believe, and Derrick Cossack’s in the Navy. Frank Harris and Gerald Raine are both doctors. There’s an Irishman named Robert O’Hara, I don’t know anything about him except that he’s a very good dancer, and I don’t know Ian Dexter either. He’s only just down from Cambridge. The last man is Neville Helston. Nigel raked him up for us at the last moment. I don’t know the first thing about him, but Nigel says he’s O.K., a pretty fair skier and keen on dancing and he’s travelled a lot. He rang me up, and he seemed very keen to come, so that’s the lot.”

  “I think it’s marvellous of you to have organised it all,” said Pippa, and Jane put in:

  “I think it jolly well is. Nobody knows what a sweat it is getting a party together like this. People say they’ll come and then say they can’t, and you book rooms and cancel them, and wrangle about reservations, feeling all the time that it’s all quite futile.”

  “And when you’ve just about decided to drop the whole thing, it all starts taking shape and people behave beautifully,” said Bridget. “I do hope it’s fun. We had a gorgeous time at Scheidegg last year, and I’m dead keen to do some more ski-ing. It should be rather amusing to have a party who don’t all know one another.”

  “Are we all meeting at Victoria tomorrow?” asked Pippa.

  “No, not quite all,” replied Bridget. “Timothy Grant is flying to Zürich, his airline’s giving him a lift. The Irishman may be travelling by a later train. He seemed a bit vague, but he knows his way about, so I left him to it. Most of us are going second class and I’ve got couchette reservations for twelve, so we shan’t have that awful business of sitting up all night. Two of the men are travelling third class to save money. It’ll be pretty grim for them, sitting up all night on hard seats, but I suppose they think it’s worth while. I’d rather them than me. It’s a perishing long journey to Austria, and those continental thirds are simply grim.”

  “Do we go right through in the same train?” asked Pippa. “Calais to Lech, wherever Lech is.”

  “It’s in Austria,” said Jane, “and the station for Lech is Langen. We drive from Langen to Lech, it’s higher up than Langen. We leave Calais at half-past five and get to Basle about seven the next morning. We change at Basle, and get a Swiss breakfast on the Austrian train. Cherry jam and croissants. Glory, how nice! I adore meals in Switzerland.”

  “Talking about meals, Jane and I are taking some food with us,” went on Bridget. “Dinner on the train costs an awful lot, no matter what currency you pay in. You can get food tickets this side and pay in sterling if you want to, but the tickets cost fifteen shillings, and fifteen bob for a meal on the train always seems a bit steep to me.”

  “Fifteen bob for dinner? Save us,” groaned Pippa. “I’ll bring my own food, sandwiches or something.”

  “Don’t cut sandwiches, they get dry,” said Bridget. “Bring a loaf and some butter, and some hard-boiled eggs and ham if you can get it. And a big Thermos with lime juice ready mixed, because the trains are frightfully hot and you’ll get terribly thirsty. We shall have lunch in the train when we leave Victoria, and you can get tea on the boat.”

  Pippa gave a wail. “Lunch on the boat train just before a Channel crossing with the worst gale of the year blowing? What a hope.”

  “It’s only about an hour’s crossing and there’s no need to be sick,” said Jane firmly. “Take a Kwells and make an act of faith…”

  “Mountains…” murmured Pippa. “Faith may move them, but it won’t make my lunch stay put if—”

  “Don’t be morbid,” said Bridget firmly. “And remember, twelve o’clock at the Golden Arrow arch. We’ve got our registered baggage to cope with, and it always takes longer than you expect, so although our train doesn’t leave until one, we’re going to meet at twelve. So now trot home and sleep well and dream of ski-ing down the nursery slopes at Lech.”

  “Heaven!” cried Pippa.

  “—or head first in a snowdrift,” said Jane. “Until you’ve tried ski-ing, you’ve just no idea how many different ways there are of falling, or how many places on your anatomy you can collect bruises. You have been warned!”

  2

  New Year’s Day, 1951, was as dreary a day as an English winter can devise. It dawned with a bitter wind, while rain and sleet drove in a mixture of perishing misery across the drab London streets. At nine o’clock, a half-hearted pallid light shone on throngs of office workers who battled their way through slush and gale or stood in depressed queues at bus stops. After that half-hearted effort at daybreak, a
sort of sullen deterioration set in, and by midday a yellow gloom was deepening to obstinate darkness.

  Jane Harrington and Meriel Parsons stood nobly by the Golden Arrow arch at Victoria, counting up their party, giving advice and information about registered baggage, while everybody said the same thing: “Thank heaven we’re getting out of this, into the sunshine.”

  The thought of sunshine over the mountains in contrast to the filth and gloom of London animated the whole party as they made their way to the boat train platform, all laden with miscellaneous baggage. All had boots slung around them somewhere, some had skis, though most of the party intended to hire them. Bridget was busy handing over railway tickets and introducing everybody to everybody.

  “Jane, Meriel, Pippa, Daphne… Oh, do you know Malcolm Perry and Derrick Cossack? Jane, have you seen Martha and Frank? Oh, and there’s Gerald, and that must be Jillian and Ian… How many’s that? We’ve got seats all together in the same coach. Do get in, everybody. Jane, count them in. Is this one of us?”

  “Miss Manners? I’m Robert O’Hara. What a day, it’s like night with the lid on. I only just made it. I thought my taxi would never get across.”

  “Is that the lot?” murmured Jane to Bridget, who was still standing on the platform.

  “No. The last man hasn’t come yet… I do hope he’s not letting us down,” said Bridget. “We’re rather a pleasant-looking crowd, aren’t we? The Irishman’s a big lad, isn’t he? and I like those tweeds of Pippa’s.”

  “You’d never know he was an Irishman, he doesn’t sound like one,” said Jane.

  “He may be a North American Indian for all I know about him, but he looks all right to me,” said Bridget. “Who’s this? Our lost lamb? He’s cut it pretty fine.”

  A tall dark fellow came running up the platform. “Miss Manners? I’m Helston. Sorry I’m late, my other train was held up in the fog. Nigel sends this with his love.” “This” was a box of chocolates.