Running Water is an adventure novel by the British writer A.E.W.Mason in 1907. The story could be noticeable as mountaineering crime fiction with a romantic turn. A story of danger, romance, and adventure as mountain-climbers fight to save a climber who has slipped on a huge glacier. The novel combines a love story with a story of adventures under the banner of philosophical views. The heroine of this romance is Sylvia Thesiger, a beautiful young woman with an envious mother and love of the Alps. The novel begins with her first climb, up the icy black rocks of Col. Silent to the top of Aiguille d'Argentiere, in the company of Captain Hilary Chayne. After their first meeting on the Mont Blanc mountain, Sylvia goes back to England to live with her father (whom she has never link up). Skinner shows to be a dangerous man with a puzzling past and Sylvia tries, with Chayne's help, to protect the appointed victim. The final encounter takes place on the lethal Brenva route, one of the most adventurous ways to reach the top of Mont Blanc.
Major Alfred Edward Woodley Mason, born in May 1865, was a British writer and politician. He studied at Dulwich College and graduated from Trinity College, Oxford in 1888. He was a fellow of Liberal Anthony Hope, who went on to write the adventure book The Prisoner of Zenda. He was an actor before he turn out a writer. He was also a keen cricket player. Mason was chose as a Liberal Member of Parliament for Coventry in the 1906 General Election. He handled only a single term in Parliament retiring at the next general election in January 1910. His first book, A Romance of Westdale, was published in 1895. He was the writer of more than 20 books, including At the Villa Rose (1910), a mystery novel in which he introduced his French detective, Inspector Hanaud. His best-known book is The Four Feathers, which has been made into several films. Other books are The House of Arrow (1924), No Other Tiger (1927), The Prisoner in the Opal (1929) and Fire Over England (1937). Mason altered to non-fiction as well, he wrote a biography of Sir Francis Drake (1941). He was functioning on a non-fiction book about Admiral Robert Blake when he died in 1948.
