Mountain Thrillers and “Alpine Divorces”

Cover image of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s The Mystery at the Chalet School, 1947.

I’m working on a piece about crime fiction set in Canadian mountainous regions (mostly the Rockies), and that has me dipping into Alpine crime fiction from other nations, for comparison.

But let’s start with the new-to-me phrase “alpine divorce.”

This is not benign, even as divorces go: it involves a male mountaineer who abandons his female hiking or climbing or mountain-biking romantic partner on his way to the summit, or during his retreat back down the mountain in bad weather.

The excuses are myriad: he’s going to get help; she’s injured and can’t keep up; they had an argument, and she insisted on staying behind.

But this is apparently enough of a phenomenon to merit a name, because sometimes the consequences are fatal.

From the opening of a New York Times piece today:

“One afternoon in July 2024, Stefanie Peiker, a hiking guide in the Austrian Alps, came across a woman lying on the ground, heavily injured after falling off her electric bike.

‘Her face was completely destroyed, she was bleeding and crying,’ Ms. Peiker said. ‘The first thing I asked was, ‘Are you alone?”

The woman explained that she’d been cycling with her boyfriend, Ms. Peiker said, but he had left her after an argument.

‘I called the ambulance, took out my first-aid kit,’ said Ms. Peiker, 31, who was on duty as a park ranger in a nature reserve that is part of a network of protected areas called Natura 2000. ‘Then, the boyfriend came back and screamed how stupid she is and that she destroyed his holiday.””

I’m picturing how Nevada Barr’s fictional park ranger, Anna Pigeon, would address this fellow.

My parents named me Heidi, a compromise.

I could have been a Gretchen, or a Robin, or (I think my mother was joking) a Brunhillde.

So as a child, when I first watched Shirley Temple as Heidi, I was hooked. I read all of the books multiple times, sympathizing particularly when Heidi is whisked away to boarding school and her schoolmates mock her because her loving grandfather mails her a stinky goat’s cheese.

What I liked about Heidi, and Anne of Green Gables, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was an immersion in the natural environment: the place mattered as much as the characters, because the protagonist had a spiritual, almost pantheistic relationship to the natural world.

In high school, I spent three months in the Alps, in a chalet perched on a mountain, during an exchange program.

The family I lived with was Swiss-German, although Valais was predominantly French-speaking, so most of the time, I had no clue what they were saying: the tiny bit of German I’d picked up from older relatives was no help with this particular dialect.

The food was wonderful.

The mountains were a delight: cows, and herds of goats, and tiny villages where a café attached to the post office sold bitter black coffee. I felt free and unafraid in the Alps, even though we did things like hitchhiking home from a Saturday night at the movies (because there was no train service) that now seem worrying.

Valeriya Safronova in the Times notes that “Alpine divorce has dark undertones: Even if done without the intent to harm, leaving behind someone less experienced in a mountain range like the Alps, where temperatures often fall below zero, and the weather changes unexpectedly, can lead to severe consequences.”

Intriguingly, the phrase is borrowed from Scottish-Canadian writer Robert Barr’s (very) short story: “An Alpine Divorce.”

A man and his ill-matched wife are both strong-willed and determined; neither will compromise. Over time, this has made their marriage a misery that he is determined to end:

“In some parts of the world incompatibility of temper is considered a just cause for obtaining a divorce, but in England no such subtle distinction is made, and so until the wife became criminal, or the man became both criminal and cruel, these two were linked together by a bond that only death could sever. Nothing can be worse than this state of things, and the matter was only made the more hopeless by the fact that Mrs. Bodman lived a blameless life, and her husband was no worse, but rather better, than the majority of men. Perhaps, however, that statement held only up to a certain point, for John Bodman had reached a state of mind in which he resolved to get rid of his wife at all hazards. If he had been a poor man he would probably have deserted her, but he was rich, and a man cannot freely leave a prospering business because his domestic life happens not to be happy.”

A summer trip to Switzerland gives him his chance. They are staying high up in the mountains, and he locates a precipitous drop from a cliff that will work nicely for his purposes.

He invites his wife to go for a walk.

There’s a twist. I don’t want to ruin it, because it’s worth reading.

I’ll finish up with a quick overview of what I’m reading and writing about, as I draft a proposal for a residency for “mountain writers”:

J.E. Barnard’s The Falls mysteries, set in the Alberta Foothills and the Rockies

Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s The Retreat

Sarah Pearse’s The Sanatorium

Allie Reynolds’s Shiver

Ruth Ware’s One by One

For other mountain-themed fiction set outside the Alps and the Rockies, see especially Dana Stabenow’s excellent Alaska-set crime fiction and the aforementioned Nevada Barr.