Tue 16 Jul 2024
A 1001 Midnights Review: RON FAUST – Tombs of Blue Ice.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[3] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
RON FAUST – Tombs of Blue Ice. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1974. No paperback edition.
During a mountain-climbing expedition in the French Alps, a sudden storm breaks and one of the two companions of American Robert Holmes is killed by a bolt of lightning; the other climber, a German named Dieter Streicher, is seriously injured. Unable to move Streicher, Holmes returns to the village of Chamonix to report the incident and request immediate help for the wounded man.
A search party is sent out to the high mountain ledge where the accident occurred, but surprisingly finds no sign of Streicher, alive or dead. What could have happened to the man? Could he have managed to leave the ledge under his own power, for some unknown reason? Or has he been a victim of foul play?
Streicher is the son of a vicious Nazi Occupation leader, and there are many in the little French valley who have good reason to want him dead: among them a woman named Christiane Renaud, whom Holmes desires; and her stepfather, the bitter old mountain guide Martigny.
Holmes sets out on his own to find Streicher and the truth about the man’s disappearance. Most of the novel involves his determined quest, and most of it is harrowing, especially Holmes’s descent into a huge crevasse, literally a tomb of blue ice. This is high-tech adventure writing, with a simple plot, strong characters, and evocative prose that includes memorable descriptive passages about mountain climbing and the glacial Alpine wilderness.
Ron Faust excels at outdoor crime/adventure fiction of all types, as his other novels prove: The Wolf in the Clouds (1977) which is about a pair of U.S. forest rangers and a madman on the loose in the Colorado Rockies; The Burning Sky (1978), which deals with a deadly big-game hunt in a mountain valley in New Mexico (and which John D. MacDonald called “strong, tough … with that flavor of inevitability that seasons the good ones”); and three paperback originals with Mexican settings: The Long Count (1979), Death Fires (1980), and Nowhere to Run (1981).
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
July 18th, 2024 at 7:43 pm
Ron Faust is one of those unjustly forgotten writers. I remember reading THE WOLF IN THE CLOUDS, THE BURING SKY, and THE LONG COUNT in the 1970s and enjoying all of them.
July 18th, 2024 at 8:48 pm
I don’t remember reading anything by Ron Faust, although I was aware of his books back in the 70s when was he writing them. He wrote quite a few of them, too. Here’s a list below which I just copied from the Fantastic Fiction website. His books from the 90s and later I didn’t know about until now:
Series
Dan Shaw
Dead Men Rise Up Never (2004)
Sea of Bones (2004)
The Blood-Red Sea (2005)
Novels
Snowkill (1970)
aka Tombs of Blue Ice
The Burning Sky (1978)
aka The Killing Game
Long Count (1979)
Death Fires (1980)
Nowhere to Run (1981)
In the Forest of the Night (1993)
When She Was Bad (1994)
Fugitive Moon (1995)
Lord of the Dark Lake (1996)
Split Image (1997)
Jackstraw (2013)
The Wolf in the Clouds (2013)
Award nominations
2005 Edgar Award for Best Paperback original (nominee) : Dead Men Rise Up Never
Unjustly forgotten? I’d have to agree.
July 20th, 2024 at 11:22 pm
IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT was my first Faust novel, a terrific adventure novel that managed to invoke not only the great British adventure writers but notes of Hemingway and Conrad. Splendid writer who needs to be rediscovered.