Hammond Innes · 1947 · thriller

Hammond Innes's 1947 thriller, written out of a punishing army ski course in the Dolomites. A demobbed writer is hired to produce a film treatment at a hut above Cortina, and finds the other guests have all come for the same reason and none of them will say what it is. Whatever is buried up there was put there in the last months of the war.

1. 1
   London

   Neil Blair, out of the army and out of money, takes a vague commission from an acquaintance to go to the Dolomites and write a film script - terms generous enough that he does not ask the questions he should.

2. 2
   Milan

   The route runs through a northern Italy still full of the war's loose ends - black market, displaced men, unaccounted property - and the other travellers heading the same way turn out to be going to precisely the same hut.

3. 3
   Cortina d'Ampezzo

   At Cortina the ski season is starting again for the first time since the war, and the little party assembles: a countess, an Englishman, an Italian and an American, all of them cordial and all of them lying.

4. 4
   Col da Varda

   The hut at Col da Varda is reached by a slittovia up through the trees, and can be cut off entirely by weather - which is what happens, with everyone in it, once it becomes clear what was hidden there in 1945.