A summary of "Hotel ’At the Dead Climber’" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The novella was written in 1969. It’s a detective story intertwined with science fiction drama. Police inspector Peter Glebski arrives at a secluded mountain hotel, where mysterious and tragic events unfold after an avalanche. In 1979, Tallinnfilm released a film adaptation of the novella, directed by Grigori Kromanov. The film won the Silver Asteroid Award at the Trieste International Fantastic Film Festival. The work is a standalone text and is not part of a literary series.

Mysterious guests of the mountain hotel

Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at the two-story hotel "At the Dead Climber’s," located in the deep European valley of Vinga. The owner, Alek Snevar, explains the story behind the hotel’s name: a climber once fell from a cliff, leaving behind only his faithful St. Bernard, Lel. Glebsky plans to spend a two-week vacation here, a break from duty, reports, and family concerns.

An unusual group gathers at the hotel. The hotel rooms are occupied by the wealthy Albert Moses and his dazzling but cold wife Olga, the gloomy physicist Simon Simonet, prone to strange acrobatics on doorframes, and the magician Lucius du Barnstoker with his deceased brother’s child, Brun. Brun’s gender and age remain a mystery for a long time: the creature wears men’s clothing, skillfully rides a heavy Bucephalus motorcycle, and has a defiant demeanor. Later, the two-meter-tall Scandinavian Olaf Andvarafors and the sullen guest Hinkus, who calls himself a juvenile lawyer, arrive at the hotel.

Oddities and the first incident

From the very first days, strange things have been happening at the hotel. Shoes disappear from Du Barnstoker’s room and turn up in the dead climber’s museum room. Wet footprints from bare feet appear in the hallways, water flows spontaneously in the unlocked shower, and the closed rooms smell of fresh pipe tobacco. Mr. Moses reports the theft of an expensive gold watch with a zodiac sign.

Soon, Glebsky finds a note covered in glue on his desk. The stranger warns that Hinkus is posing as a dangerous gangster nicknamed "Filin." Another threatening letter, signed "F.", is received by du Barnstoker. The inspector secretly searches Hinkus’s room. One of the guest’s suitcases contains rags and random books, but at the bottom of the second suitcase, Glebsky finds Moses’s missing gold watch and a small pistol. The inspector unloads the weapon and returns the items.

That evening, the owner hosts a Welcoming of Spring celebration. Guests dance, drink liqueur, and play cards. At 10:02 PM, the earth shakes from a powerful impact. A gigantic avalanche descends in the Bottleneck Gorge, blocking the only exit from the valley and severing the telephone lines. The hotel is cut off from the outside world.

A locked room and a mysterious death

That night, a frozen, one-armed man with no identification appears at the hotel door. The owner and Glebsky drag the stranger inside and warm him up. The exhausted man can’t explain who he is and keeps repeating one name: "Olaf Andvarafors."

Glebsky goes up to the roof to check on Hinkus, who regularly sunbathed there. The sun lounger is occupied only by a snow dummy, dressed in the guest’s fur coat and hat. Hinkus is also missing from his room, and his watch and pistol are missing from his suitcase.

The inspector and Alek Snevar go to Olaf’s room. The door is locked from the inside, and frosty air blew through the cracks. After unlocking the door with a spare key, they find Olaf dead on the floor. The Scandinavian’s head is twisted 180 degrees, his face contorted, and in his fist is clutched the wooden beads of the maid Kaisa. His breath smells of a pungent chemical, and a flat metal suitcase containing instruments lies on the floor nearby.

Investigation under the snowfall

Glebsky seals the deceased’s room, hides the suitcase in the owner’s safe, and begins interrogating him. In the museum room, he finds Hinkus bound and gagged. The freed guest horrifiedly claims he was attacked on the roof by his own double.

Du Barnstoker admits to harmless pranks involving shoes and a shower, but denies writing anonymous notes. Physicist Simonet, in a panic, reports that he crept up to Mrs. Moses in the dark at night, but found her body cold and hard, like a wooden mannequin. Glebsky checks Mrs. Moses’s phone number and finds her alive, reading a book.

During interrogation, Brune revealed that she was a woman. Brune admitted that she had been in Olaf’s room that evening. When the roar of the avalanche was heard at 10:02 PM, Olaf clutched his head, panicked, threw it out into the hallway, and locked the door.

Revealing identities and true motives

Lel digs a heavy Luger loaded with silver bullets out of the snow in front of the hotel. Glebsky interrogates Hinkus again. When the guest attempts to attack the inspector, Simone stuns him with a broken pool cue. Hinkus is locked in a closet. Cornered, the gangster confesses that his real nickname is Filin. A gang leader nicknamed Champion sent him to spy on the mysterious Beelzebub, whom the criminals believed to be a powerful sorcerer.

The one-armed stranger calls himself Luarvik L. Luarvik. He offers Glebski a bribe of 80,000 crowns, handed over by Moses, for the return of the metal suitcase. The inspector confiscates the money and refuses the deal.

Then Moses and Simone reveal the true state of affairs to Glebsky. Moses and Luarvik are representatives of an extraterrestrial civilization. Mrs. Moses and Olaf are their high-tech robots. The bandit Champion blackmailed Moses into using the alien devices to rob banks. The aliens fled to a mountain hotel, planning an evacuation, but an explosion at their power plant triggered an avalanche and knocked out the robots. Olaf wasn’t killed: the power outage caused spasms in his artificial muscles and dislocated his joints. The suitcase contains a portable battery needed to revive the robot and maintain Luarvik’s life support system.

Dramatic denouement

Moses asks Glebsky to return the suitcase so he can revive Olaf and fly away before the bandits arrive. The suspicious inspector, loyal to his duty, refuses to hand over the evidence or release the suspects. He insists on waiting for the Earth police.

Realizing the inspector’s intransigence, Snevar and Simone forcibly take the safe keys from Glebsky and hand the suitcase over to the aliens. Moses, Luarvik, a revived Olaf, and Olga take the heavy chest and ski across the snowy valley to the evacuation point.

At that moment, a helicopter belonging to the Champion gang appears over the valley. The criminals catch up with the fugitives and open fire with machine guns. The aliens and their robots perish in the snow under the gangsters’ fire, after which the helicopter flies away.

Echoes of the past

Twenty years later, retired Senior Inspector Peter Glebsky recalls the mountain tragedy. The road was cleared two days after the crash. Champion’s helicopter later crashed into a deep mountain lake, and the remaining gang members were arrested on a tip from Hinkus.

Simon Simonet dedicated his life to trying to prove alien visitation, but he faced the scientific community’s distrust and later died in the mountains. Du Barnstocker lived to be ninety, Brun married a famous astronaut, and Alec Snevar continued to manage the expanded hotel.

Technically, Glebsky acted legally and received a promotion, but his conscience torments him into his old age. He realizes that the aliens were victims of human crimes and dry bureaucratic regulations.