In which novels or stories does the final outcome, the last deciding battle between the forces of good and evil, ultimately hinge upon who wins a fistfight or other physical brawl on the brink of a precipice? I`m not counting movie novelisations, where this motif is practically mandatory, but offhand I can think of 3, with the final scores:
Sherlock Holmes vs. Moriarty, on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls, in His Last Bow {scoreless draw, into extra time for Holmes}
Lord Azrael and Mrs Coulter vs. The Archangel Metatron, above a rent in the fabric of reality, in The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman {scoreless draw again}
Frodo vs. Gollum, above the Crack of Doom, in The Return Of The King {one-nil to Frodo}
The Quiet Man comes to mind. Granted it is a short story rather than a novel and it is hardly a battle, but the protagonist does asert his rights through a punch (maybe two).
Of course, John Ford converted the one punch into 20 minutes of punches when he made it into a film, but that is film after all.
I don’t know about books or stories, but loads of movies have ended with a climactic battle along a cliff, canyon, or chasm of some kind.
One of the most noteworthy is “North By Northwest” (climactic fight on Mount Rushmore)
Madame Defarge and Miss Pross (Lucie Manette’s faithful maid), near the end of A Tale of Two Cities.
Defarge’s pistol is discharged during the struggle (an allegory of Proper British Womanhood Versus Those Crazy Radical Frogeaters), and it kills her.
Well, in movie-land, we have King Kong and Batman, but you requested books, not movies.
Hmmmm, this is touger than I thought. The only thing that comes to mind right now is Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare, with the fight in the cable car.
Must think on this some more.
RR
Can’t get much more precipitous than The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight[ing] in Heaven!
Tho not at the edge of a cliff, my first thought was from Jim Harrison’s A good Day to Die. One character walks up to another guy in a bar and coldcocks him. His companion asks what he was doin, the other guy might have know karate. The “precipitous” part comes with the response, “Nobody knows karate if you get a good enough shot in first.”
I hang my head in shame. Holmes vs. Moriarty was, of course, in The Final Problem and not His Last Bow. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.