Telluride Smile

Henry Dyer

by Ray Ring

Strange things are happening in Telluride, Colorado. Martin Rivers has run off into the San Juan Mountains outside town, caught up in a fantasy, living as a nineteenth-century mountain man and arousing the forces of law and order against him. The local think tank, all glitz and flash on the outside, is rotten at the core and no one wants to talk about it. And even in a town where partying is the dominant lifestyle, the nightlife has reached an unacceptable level of nastiness.

Enter Henry Dyer, a fiftyish loner and former game and fish agent turned detective who has retreated to a small ranch in the Arizona desert. Dyer is hired by Martin Rivers's parents to locate their son and bring him home before anyone gets hurt. But along the way people do get hurt. Bones are broken, and so are hearts. Ambitions are thwarted and dreams are crushed.

The Mountain Man's trail through wintry high country leads Dyer into a deeper mystery, one involving blackmail, a string of murders, and the stormy love affair between people and the land, as well as Dyer's own stormy love affair with Whitley, the local lawyer.

Raymond Ring has combined mystery, wit, and the wide-open spaces of the American West to create a first-rate detective story.

Raymond H. Ring received his bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Colorado. He has won a dozen awards for investigative journalism, including Journalist of the Year by the Arizona Press Association, the National Investigative Reporters & Editors Award for Distinguished Investigative Reporting, and a Certificate of Merit for Reporting from the American Bar Association Gavel Awards. He currently writes a weekly column for New Times. Ring lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is at work on a second Henry Dyer novel.

247 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1988

About the author

Ray Ring has made his living as a writer in the inland American West for more than 35 years, focusing on underdogs and bad actors, human absurdities and the need for equal rights, environmental science and our drift toward dystopia. He studied in six public universities without fitting into any ivory towers, and did a range of blue-collar work as a young man, which helps his writing be real. He knows a bit about how to fell a tree and how to drive a bulldozer and a fire engine. His new 2023 novel is Montana Blues (Writers Canyon Press) and his three previous novels are Arizona Kiss (Little, Brown and Company 1991), Peregrine Dream (St. Martin's Press 1990) and Telluride Smile (Dodd, Mead & Company 1988) -- unusual mysteries or hardboiled noir. He's won a dozen national journalism awards, and for many years he was senior editor of the nonprofit magazine, High Country News, covering the West and the national dynamics affecting the region. He lives in Tucson, where he enjoys hiking and the borderland culture and glimpses of bobcats in the yard or on the roof.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess this future editor at High Country News didn't think much of Telluride life.

[Pilsner]

Telluride Smile is a fun read, and a hilarious satire on trendy ski resorts. I’m not usually a fan of detective fiction, as I find most of the genre formulaic and indifferently written. But Ring creates a cast of interesting characters, and does not take his hero too seriously. The writing sparkles.

[Isis · Rating 1 out of 5]

A dark night, in a city that knows how to keep its secrets. I guess my whole opinion of the hardboiled genre has been too shaped by Guy Noir, because I kept looking for the punchline in the machine-gun prose. Failed to hold my interest despite its nominal setting in a town nearby.