A review of Crossed Skis by Carol Carnac – 240214

The sadly underrated Edith Caroline Rivett wrote under a number of pseudonyms, particularly E C R Lorac, but chose to issue her Julian Rivers series, amongst others, under the byline of Carol Carnac. Crossed Skis, a reference to the acknowledged safety signal that a skier needs assistance, is the eight in that series, originally published in 1952 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series.

There are two distinct threads to the story. The first involves a skiing party organised by Bridget Manners who travel on New Year’s Day to the Austrian resort of  Lech am Alberg from London. There are sixteen in the party making it a logistical nightmare for Bridget to organise, especially as there were some last minute drop outs and additions. Not everyone knows everyone else and the composition of such a large party allows Carnac to draw in people from different backgrounds and social circles.

The other is sparked off by a fatal fire at a boarding house in Bloomsbury run by the wonderfully tragicomic Mrs Stein and in which a badly charred body is found. Curiously, an impression made by a ski stick is found in the mud outside the property. The victim is assumed to be the tenant, Gray, and in a flash of genius Rivers of the Yard takes fingerprints from the coins in the gas meter and discovers that the dead man was known to the police as a cat burglar who had dropped a packet of cigarettes after an audacious robbery.

The device of intertwining two distinct strands of a plot into one works well on a couple of levels. Firstly, it keeps the novel moving at a cracking pace and, secondly, we are able to use snippets of information gleaned in one area to assess the implications of what is going on in the other. The carefree holiday amongst the skiers soon dissipates as one of the group discovers that they are missing some money, leading some of the shrewder members to consider that they do not really know all their travelling companions very well, an impression enhanced by some jokey references to passport photographs not being very true representations of the holder and the realisation that one of the late additions to the group only caught the train by the skin of their teeth.

Meanwhile in London, Inspector Rivers develops a theory that the man behind the murder and arson attack is a skier and with his colleague, Lancing, is soon on the track of skiing parties that left London on New Year’s Day. Inevitably, all pistes leas to Lech am Alberg. Alerted by news from a friend that Scotland Yard are sniffing around, Frank Harris and Kate Reid, the latter based on Carnac herself, also do some sleuthing themselves and realise that one of their number is a bad hat, coming to the same conclusion as the professionals.

Carnac uses the fact that there are sixteen members of the party cleverly. The reader is barely introduced to them at the beginning and get little more than a pen picture, allowing her to drip feed more and more pertinent information as the story progresses, thus avoiding unnecessary preconceptions. As the culprit is male, this narrows the field down to eight and by the time that Rivers arrives in Lech and undertakes an audacious ski trip in foul conditions we are down to just two, one of whom crashes into a tree trunk in a dramatic denouement. There are enough clues lightly sprinkled through the text for the reader to draw their own conclusions.

A feature of Rivett’s writing is her highly attuned sense of place and her love of the natural world. Her descriptions of the Alpine scenery are wonderfully evocative, especially when contrasted with the drabness of post-war London in winter. The reader requires little knowledge of skiing, it is very much a light background theme, leaving time to marvel at a gentle but compelling account of how the dynamics of a group work and unravel and how a clever and likeable policeman gets his man. Highly enjoyable.