I had such a great time reading and reviewing cat-themed books for #ReadingtheMeow2025. As a cat lover, these books hold a special place in my heart, and I’m loath to give up this enjoyable experience. However, I have some cat-themed books scheduled for review later in the summer.
Now, I’m thrilled to shift my focus to another literary joy of mine: the captivating books written by Carol Carnac, also known as E.C.R. Lorac. Under the Carnac pseudonym, Lorac pens her Julian Rivers mystery series, of which I have reviewed only one- Crossed Skis– a tale where a brutal snowstorm nearly aids a murderer’s escape. Carnac’s unintentional theme of extreme weather disrupting a murderer’s plans continues to fascinate me.
Introduction
Impact of Evidence is the eleventh installment in Carol Carnac’s Julian Rivers series and the second Carnac novel to be republished as a part of the British Library Crime Classics Series. Initially published in 1954, this book, which was primarily out of print, was republished in 2024, and I hope it marks the return of the rest of the series to the reading public.
The Plot
Julian Rivers is dispatched to a tranquil farming town, now a battleground of winter’s fury, when a young farmer and the local elderly, half blind doctor meet in a catastrophic car crash on an icy road. The doctor and an unidentified companion are discovered lifeless at the scene, setting the stage for a gripping mystery.
The unknown man with the doctor has no identification and isn’t known in the village. When the coroner tells Rivers that the mystery man has been dead for several days longer than the doctor, he is left with many questions.
How did a stranger enter the village when it had been cut off from the world by snow, ice, and flooding for days? Who visited Dr. Robinson, who, in the three years he lived in the village, received no strangers and barely spoke to the young couple helping him keep up his household? No one can say anything about the doctor’s life before he arrived in the village three years before, in 1940.
Who is the body in the boot of the car? Why is there a body of a stranger in the back of Dr. Robinson’s hermetically sealed car? Should the villagers have involved the local authorities sooner in banning the doctor from driving, given that they all knew how dangerous a driver he was?
When the local inspector is found in the doctor’s locked household with a concussion and several broken bones, supposedly accrued by falling down a staircase, they send in Chief Inspector Julian Rivers from Scotland Yard to investigate if the injuries the local policeman sustained are connected to the discovery of the unknown body.
Julian Rivers, with the assistance of Detective Inspector Lancing, begins to scrutinize the local suspects. The cast of characters is rich and diverse: a stoic farming family, a young couple aiding Dr. Robinson, a reclusive couple with a history of minor offenses, the enigmatic Dr. Robinson himself, and the young, injured farmer who collided with the doctor’s car. Each character is a puzzle piece in this intricate mystery.
As Rivers and Lancing delve deeper into their investigation, they unearth a trove of secrets, a string of minor offenses, and a wealth of misdeeds that are known and concealed by the insular and reticent farming community. The plot thickens, and the truth is tantalizingly close.
The Review
First and foremost, with any of Carnac or Lorac’s work, there is an immediate sense of place. She depicts the tiny village of St. Brynny’s as a hard-working, beautiful, and remote place. Life for the villagers, usually difficult enough, is under heavy strain from the constant, terrible weather of snow and consequent flooding as a hellcat rainstorm sets in.
The crash of the car wreck reverberates through the village, and everyone who can reach the car crash expends a significant amount of energy trying to get the bodies out of the wreck, which is filling rapidly with freezing water.
The roads are nearly impassable from ice and flooding, and the two strongest and most able-bodied men must walk in the pelting rain miles to the local magistrate to report the deaths. Unable to do more for the dead men, they are laid out in a barn, with the hope that help will come before they have to be buried in the local woods due to rotting.
The magistrate who hears the heroic and dangerous feats of the villagers to get and safeguard the bodies, motivates him to cross the river that borders the village has swelled to bursting- in fact the only way to even r each the police is to ride his charge horse that’s eighteen hands high across the river to the police and where he calls in amphibous assault vehicles from the army to render aid and which he stocks with food and other supplies for the villagers who are slowly starving because food cannot be delivered to them.
The people who populate the book are good, honest, hard-scrabble men and women who bravely face a natural disaster and try to take care of their dead. It’s a stark portrayal of trying to do what is right in dire circumstances, where humanity can be stripped away when it’s easier not to care, especially for a stranger. The characters are portrayed in such a way that it’s tough to imagine there’s a killer on the loose, and so far, everyone is so likable that I didn’t want anyone to be the murderer.
However, even during the initially heroism recounted to the local magistrate, Colonel Wynne, he wonders if the bravery might be a facade, that some small argument or flash of temper might have lead to the killing of a stranger, but Wynne, who has lived among these people can find no reason to believe his insticnt and even cautions Rivers when he recounts the report made to him that he has only a vague feeling of unease that is telling his intuition that a local has committed this murder.
Rivers and Lancing, when they take over the investigation, are a delightful duo – they have a lot of easy and humorous banter. They are initially out of their element in this farming community. However, through continued kindness and a willingness to laugh at how absurd it is for two London police officers to be dealing with blackguards in rural Wales, they do make inroads in the community.
As they interview everyone, construct timelines and unearth secrets, a few things are apparent- Carnac has an affinity for farming folk and paints them in a upstanding way, unlike the farming folk in her Lunesdale vignette of Macdonald books, there’s a whisper of suspicion planted early on that makes the reader question the sincerity of the books protaganist, which I liked.
The unneighborly, gossip-mongering couple that live a little outside the village, both metaphorically and in actual geography, are painted mainly black. They lie, poach, and are the center of domestic violence. When the husband disappears, a bloody body is found, and his wife is found badly beaten- I thought- oh- Carnac went obvious with her ending, but of course Carnac pulls out a clever twist and misdirected me entirely.
Who is good, who’s only playing good, and who is well and truly a killer is the constant refrain of the story. The mechanics of the crime are stretched to believability, but the cleverness of the crime is ingenious. I did think of a more straightforward way the killer could have committed the crime upon reflection. Still, the ending was satisfying and surprising, and once again cements Julian Rivers, who almost didn’t figure out how it was done, as a truly superb detective who deserves to be read and appreciated more.
My Final Thoughts
Like all Carnac or Lorac books, Impact of Evidence is rooted in people in a particular place, whose internal ecosystem creates and fosters a specific type of crime and the corresponding type of criminal. I think Carnac is exceptional at really placing you in the lives of her characters- they feel real, their disputes and triumphs feel real, and once all the pieces of the puzzle are laid bare, it’s easy to see how a strange murder could have been sown and grown there.
I loved the use of a natural disaster to ramp up the tension in the book, providing immediate danger and revealing the characters’ motivations and true natures, as well as the slow reveal of all the secrets they have been hiding (or not) from each other in the village. Julian Rivers is another solid investigator, with a bit more humor and a placid Londoner, but he shone as a fish out of water in this mystery.
Even though the empathetic portrayal of the plight of rural farmers is a constant in Carnac and Lorac’s work, I’m not tired of her recurring stolid farming families. I love them and appreciate her commentary on the harsh conditions many Britons faced during World War II and the changing landscape they weathered in the aftermath of the war.
And finally, whether writing under the Lorac or Carnac nom de plume, Edith Caroline Rivett has a definite love for writing car crashes as her inciting incident. Later this summer, I’ll be reviewing Two-Way Murder, which also involves an impossible crime in a car crash.
I’m a fan of the Julian Rivers series and hope that the British Library Crime Classics series puts the rest of the series into print. I recommend reading Impact of Evidence and adding it to your TBR.
Further Reading:
Carol Carnac Book Reviews
Julian Rivers Series
Crossed Skis (1952)
or
E.C.R. Lorac Book Reviews
- Death of an Author (1935)
Robert Macdonald
- Post After Post-Mortem (1936)
- These Names Make Clues (1937)
- Fell Murder (1944)
- Murder by Matchlight (1945)
- The Theft of the Iron Dogs (1946)
- Crook O’Lune (1953)
Golden Age of Detective Fiction 
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