It usually takes me about five books to figure out where I stand with an author — to cover something good, something borrowed, something blue and eventually figure out whether I like the skull beneath the skin of their writing. Impact of Evidence (1954) is my eleventh book by Edith Caroline Rivett — here writing as Carol Carnac, though best-known as E.C.R. Lorac — and represents another example of me not quite figuring her out. Her ideas are interesting, and she demonstrates no small acuity with her characters, but her plotting seems to stall at times and so the book didn’t for me reach the same level of immersion as Crook o’ Lune (1953) from the year before.

Heavy snowfall has seen the denizens of the isolated Welsh community of St. Brynneys cut off from the surrounding countryside, and, now that the snow has stopped, the ensuing thaw sees flooding escalate matters: overflowing the only bridge to civilisation and so adding another complication. It is in this setting that the retired Dr. Robinson, driving up the nearby steep Hollybanks hilly, collides with a jeep and is knocked into the swollen river…only for a rescue attempt to discover that there has been a dead body in the back of Robinson’s car at the time of the collision. Since Robinson died in the crash, and since no outsiders would have been able to make it into the community for a couple of weeks due to the bad weather, what possible explanation can be found for this unknown corpse?

The setup is superb, and Rivett does her usual immersive job of telling you about the people and the isolated corner of the countryside they inhabit without dumping information over you for pages at a time: her writing of these rural tales is always notable for how completely the reader is simply dropped into things and trusted to do the necessary legwork to keep up with people and events. In a way, this makes Rivett’s books singularly difficult to separate out — the core cast of farmers here is, really, no different to the people found in Crook o’ Lune or Fire in the Thatch (1946) — but, well, when you know you’re this good at something, why strain yourself too greatly being less successful at something new?

[N]obody had let their eyes rest on the barn doors, but at the back of everyone’s mind was the thought of those two bodies — and their minds jibbed away from a problem which had no precedent to help them to solve it.

When the local men are unable to resolve the issue, the aptly-named DCI Julian Rivers is dispatched from Scotland Yard to somehow make his way out to the secluded scene and find the answers, and so we meet everyone again, and go to the scene of the crash again, and are told lots of detail again…and it started to feel like maybe we had a novella’s worth of plot here that was being padded out. And with that dissatisfaction came others, such as the feeling that this could really use a map — not to go on about Crook o’ Lune, but the one there was very helpful indeed — and that the scene of the crash seemed to get less and less clear in my mind every time someone talked about it.

Some intriguing ideas present themselves — that Robinson might have had something in his past worth hiding, or that the Lambton family who are the centre of so much might know more than they’re letting on — but this all felt like window-dressing to distract you from the glaringly obvious suspect who’s clearly going to turn out to be guilty in the end, and so, rather like Tour de Force (1955) by Christianna Brand, another British Library Crime Classic reprint, I found myself impatiently waiting to be proved right, then was. Not the ideal reading experience.

Mileage will, therefore, vary, and I won’t deny that Rivett does excellent work making her Welsh farmers out at as industrious, moral, and intelligent people with much to offer this turn of events which should, by all reasonable expectations, be well beyond their ken. The talk of frozen corpses, the “Henry solution”, the canny observations of their fellow man. It’s more a novel of character than plot, but it seems that this happened to Rivett’s books as her career progressed, so I shouldn’t really complain. That my favourite of her reprints is the early, all-but-forgotten Death of an Author (1935) might explain the slight antipathy I feel towards this one, but I’ll still not deny that, if you’re in for a gentle time with acutely-realised people, there’s much here to enjoy and to explain Rivett’s continued success as part of this series.

Some points of interest can be found here, too: “Herbert Henry Asquith” apparently meaning ‘wait and see’ — I love it, but does…does anyone know what that’s about? And Rivers, while distinguishing himself from Inspector Robert MacDonald in the books written as E.C.R. Lorac not one jot, is a pleasingly soothing and human presence at the heart of things.

It was often like that in police work, thought Rivers. The grim and the grotesque, the indecent and the dutiful, the intelligent and the lunatic, all jumbled together on the instant.

Established fans of Rivett will find much here that appeals, and I’m just going to have to acquaint myself with the fact that I may never get a hold on her writing. I’m grateful to the BL for republishing these, and for supplying me with this copy, as when she does what I like, I like it very much indeed; but like this I find her just a little tepid, and it makes me hesitate when it comes to jumping in to another of her books. I shall, however, become curious every so often, because at her best I’ve had some wonderful times in her pages, and so the exploration will doubtless continue.

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See also

Martin Edwards: This is a pretty good premise for a traditional detective story and Inspector Julian Rivers of Scotland Yard turns up to conduct the investigation. We learn that he spent some of his early days on a farm in Norfolk and it’s clear that, like Inspector Macdonald in the Lorac books, his burgeoning interest in the countryside and the challenges of farming life reflects his creator’s enthusiasms. As so often with these books, the evocation of rural Britain is the strongest point, but I’d add that the plot is very soundly constructed. If you’re a fan of traditional mysteries, this is a most enjoyable read.