“We see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” — 1 Corinthians 13:12
The death of Evelyn Foster has become one of those crimes whose unsolved nature is almost more essential than its facts. In the bleak January of 1931, a young woman, independent enough to drive her own car for hire, was discovered horribly burned near a lonely rise in the road called Wolf’s Nick, between Otterburn and Kirkwhelpington. She lived long enough to tell her story, though her words, instead of clarifying the crime, seemed to tangle it further. A stranger, bowler-hatted and well dressed, had forced her to let him drive her car, assaulted her, and set her alight. Yet the evidence told another tale: petrol poured from behind, a car moved after ignition, contradictions too stubborn to be reconciled with her testimony. She died, and the case has remained a riddle ever since.
Two books now stand as landmarks in the history of her memory: Jonathan Goodman’s The Burning of Evelyn Foster and Diane Janes’ Death at Wolf’s Nick. To compare them is not only to measure two writers’ different sensibilities, but to measure two very different eras in the culture of true crime itself. Goodman, publishing in 1977, belongs to the forensic antiquarian tradition: a patient scribe of depositions, a man who treats murder cases as intellectual puzzles, to be preserved in precise and careful prose. Janes, writing in the twenty-first century, belongs to the era when crime isn’t merely about guilt or innocence, but about atmosphere, psychology, and the societal structures that made the crime possible. Goodman gives us the coroner’s report; Janes gives us the novel that report could never capture. Between them lies Evelyn herself, caught between testimony and silence, fact and myth, ash and flame.
Goodman’s method is almost austere. His prose is clipped, factual, meticulously respectful of his sources. He dissects the inquest, measures the testimony, notes the contradictions. He doesn’t embellish, and he certainly doesn’t speculate wildly. His task, as he sees it, is to record the facts and test them against reason. When he considers Ernest Brown, the farmhand who later murdered his employer and tried to incinerate the body in a car, it’s as a hypothesis to be weighed with caution, not as a character to be embroidered. He presents Evelyn as the witness she was: her statements recorded, her inconsistencies noted, her death left in the ledger of the unsolved. Reading Goodman is like standing in the ruined shell of a burned house in daylight: the scorch marks are visible, the outlines legible, but the warmth is gone.
Janes, by contrast, isn’t afraid to re-inhabit the scene. She walks the road herself, breathes the moor air, looks at the incline of Wolf’s Nick and imagines what it would have felt like to drive alone there at night in 1931. She gives Evelyn a voice not only in testimony but in silence. She asks not only what happened, but what it meant: what it meant for a woman to drive a taxi in rural Northumberland; what it meant for her to be independent yet vulnerable; what it meant for society to explain away her words when they didn’t match the forensic record. Her book’s less an inquest than a requiem. She allows herself conjecture, because to her imagination isn’t trespass but duty. Goodman’s Evelyn is a case; Janes’ Evelyn is a protagonist.
The difference is also philosophical. Goodman is heir to the Victorian tradition of Fitzjames Stephen, to those who believed in law as a grand clarifier. Crime, for him, is a puzzle for intellect, a question of facts weighed against reason. He’s wary of psychology, reluctant to enter into Evelyn’s inner world, because that would mean stepping outside the evidence. Janes, by contrast, is steeped in the postmodern recognition that evidence itself is a human construct, filtered through bias, gender, and power. For her, to understand Evelyn one must imagine her inner world, not because it solves the case, but because without imagination the dead are denied even the dignity of complexity.
And yet both writers, so different in style, are equally defeated by the essential opacity of the case. Evelyn’s testimony, half-lucid, half-delirious, can’t be harmonised with the evidence. To believe her is to disbelieve the petrol stains; to believe the stains is to disbelieve her. And so we circle endlessly, like moths around a flame. Goodman records the circling; Janes inhabits it. Goodman shrugs with reserve; Janes lingers with empathy. But both leave us not with a solution, but with a haunting.
The haunting extends beyond Evelyn’s words into the culture that followed. For there was the curious business of the bowler hat. She’d described her assailant as wearing one, and almost overnight men in Northumberland abandoned the style. What had been the emblem of middle-class respectability became the mark of suspicion. Freud once remarked that in dreams a hat is never only a hat, and here his point seems grotesquely vindicated. Respectability itself had caught fire. Goodman notes the fact with a dry scholar’s amusement; Janes would likely see in it a parable of society’s paranoia, the way a community externalises its fear onto a symbol. Dickens would have found comedy in the sight of provincial clerks nervously abandoning their bowlers; Hardy would have heard the grim fatalism in it. The moor swallows all such responses, keeping its silence.
The comparison of Goodman and Janes isn’t only the comparison of two books, but of two modes of truth. Goodman’s truth is forensic, Janes’ is imaginative. Goodman preserves Evelyn as a witness whose testimony is questionable; Janes restores her as a woman whose vulnerability was undeniable. Goodman leaves us with the ash; Janes lets us see the flame still burning in the moor mist. And perhaps both are necessary, for Evelyn herself was both ash and flame.
Literature offers its parallels. Tess Durbeyfield, undone by the contradictions of respectability and ruin. Camus’ Stranger, condemned more by the incomprehension of his society than by his act. Virginia Woolf, writing of women and cars, would’ve recognised Evelyn as an emblem of modernity: free in movement, yet exposed in danger. Jung might have called the fire archetypal, the bowler hat symbolic of the shadow self, the stranger within the community. Each lens refracts the same mystery, and yet none solves it.
To stand at Wolf’s Nick today is to feel the futility of solution. The moor stretches wide, the wind cuts, the incline rises and falls, and the silence is immense. A burning car once lit this place, and a woman’s cry once disturbed it. Goodman preserves that moment in the language of evidence; Janes in the language of atmosphere. Together they ensure Evelyn Foster isn’t forgotten. Neither could solve her death; both ensured her life is remembered.
Perhaps this is the true work of writing about crime: not to solve, for most crimes resist solution, but to bear witness. Goodman, with his coroner’s prose, bore witness to the contradictions. Janes, with her novelist’s empathy, bore witness to the tragedy. Evelyn is remembered because they remembered her. And so we, too, remember: a young woman, independent yet vulnerable, burning on a moor, whispering testimony from her deathbed, and leaving behind a case that’s less a puzzle to be solved than a parable about the fragility of truth.
In that sense, Goodman and Janes are not rivals but companions. One gives us the ash, the other the smoke. One writes the report, the other the lament. And somewhere between them, in the unsolvable void, Evelyn Foster still lingers – a witness, a victim, a woman at the wheel of her car, driving into the moor night, her headlights swallowed by the mist, her story consumed by fire.
Addendum: The Whisper of Doubt
It would be dishonest to pass over the darker whisper that clings to Evelyn Foster’s tragedy. Some have wondered, then as now, whether the fire at Wolf’s Nick wasn’t an act of murder but of misjudged calculation: an ‘insurance job’ that went catastrophically awry. The thought feels cruel, almost indecent, yet the mismatch between Evelyn’s testimony and the forensic scene has kept suspicion alive.
The coroner hinted at this possibility, though he left it delicately veiled; the police muttered their doubts in private. And yet the jury, confronted with Evelyn’s fragile figure and her last words, returned the solemn verdict of murder. It’s tempting to note that among them sat the Reverend Brierly, the parish clergyman, whose presence would’ve lent weight to the gentler reading. To have declared self-infliction would’ve been to condemn Evelyn’s memory and her family to shame; to declare murder was at least to let her depart as a victim rather than an architect of her own ruin.
We may never know. But even the suspicion itself tells us something about the moral climate of the time: a community caught between the dignity of the dead and the logic of evidence, between charity and cynicism. Evelyn remains poised between those poles, both martyr and mystery, her fire unquenched, her testimony unresolved.
Wording 