Definitely Maybe (1974), a similar cross-genre experiment, was published last year in a translation by Antonina W. The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, reissued in March in an expert new translation by Josh Billings, joins several recent publications that have helped make the Strugatskys’ imaginative landscape accessible to an English-reading audience.

But they were unable to resist their speculative impulses: in place of a clever solution for the events at the inn, they introduced a bigger mystery. In his 1999 memoir, Comments on the Way Left Behind, Boris Strugatsky writes that they intended to write a commercial mystery novel along the lines of Erle Stanley Gardner or John le Carré.

For the Strugatskys, the deviation was practically involuntary. Instead, The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn departs from anything that either detective or reader could deduce. With this bizarre cast you expect to find plenty of red herrings before a hiding-in-plain-sight solution is revealed. Luarvik, a mysterious one-armed man who shows up half dead after being caught in the storm. Then there is Snevar and his maid, Kaisa a St. Everyone at the inn is a suspect: Simone Simone, a nervous, billiard-playing physicist Hinkus, a “youth counselor” on sick leave a celebrity magician named Du Barnstoker and his androgynous ward, Brun (“the sole progeny of dear departed brother”) an imperious alcoholic named Albert Moses, and his knockout wife, Mrs. Right on cue, another of the guests, a Scandinavian named Olaf Andvarafors, is found dead in his room with his neck twisted, the window open, and the door locked from the inside. Soon after Glebsky’s arrival, a blizzard blocks the road to the inn. It’s a strange idea to appear at the beginning of what seems to be a locked-room mystery novel-a genre in which all puzzles are meant to be solved. It’s like a fire flickering in the depths of the night.” “The unknown makes us think-it makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought.

“Haven’t you ever noticed how much more interesting the unknown is than the known?” Snevar asks. Near the beginning of The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, a 1970 novel by the Russian science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the innkeeper, Alek Snevar, proposes to his guest, police inspector Peter Glebsky, that mystery is always preferable to explanation.

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