WhiteEL

I have Karen to thank for highlighting the fact that Ethel Lina White was Welsh – Karen contributed a review of Fear Stalks The Village to Reading Wales Month, which is run by a different blogging Karen! Well, that was all the incentive I needed to sneak into final days of Reading Wales with a read of Some Must Watch (1933) – though I’ve called this review The Spiral Staircase, because the novel has just been reprinted under that title by Pushkin Press, presumably because of the famous film adaptation under that name. Indeed, I almost snapped up a copy of the reprint before I realised I already had it under its original title. I’ll refer to it as Some Must Watch from now on, but if you want to get your own copy then hunt for the staircase.

(Sidenote: my copy of Some Must Watch is falling apart, and that’s probably the reason it was priced at £1 by Addyman Annexe in Hay-on-Wye, when any 1930s copy is otherwise prohibitively expensive.)

The only Ethel Lina White novel I’ve read before is The Wheel Spins, which is most notable for having been adapted into Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. In Some Must Watch, White truncates the time period and the space – it is almost all in a country manor over the course of one long evening – and, in doing so, ups the tension.

Helen Capel is recently arrived at the Warren household as a ‘lady help’ – born into a class that entitles her to have meals with the family, and penniless enough to need the work. Bedridden Lady Warren is the formidable matriarch of the family – below her is her widowed son, known as the Professor, an austere and absent-minded man. His sister, Mrs Warren, is the one really running the household, and Helen’s boss. The Professor’s son is ‘a clever, ugly youth […] violently and aggressively in love with his wife, Simone’. She, meanwhile, is more interested in flirting with the resident student, Stephen Rice, a wolfish man whose chief positive trait is affection for his rescue dog.

The household at the Summit (the curious name for the house) is completed by Mr and Mrs Oates, who do almost every conceivable servant task except open the door for visitors, and the newly arrived Nurse Barker – who is an unfriendly, masculine woman given to grudges. The house is near the Welsh/English border, much like Hay-on-Wye.

I’ve rattled through the cast quite quickly, and I did have to flick to the beginning every now and then to remind me how they related to one another – but they are well-drawn, and a particular handful become important in the second half of the novel.

As the novel opens, Helen has been at the Summit for a while and is walking back home after dark – it’s her afternoon off, but she is outside after dark and this isn’t wise. A serial killer has been haunting the region, and his target is young women. His first killings were in town (somebody blithely says that nobody much minds it, if it stays in town) but he’s been getting closer and closer to them. And the Summit is in the middle of nowhere, with just a handful of nearby cottages. Helen’s walk through the woods is an excellent, chilling start to Some Must Watch – we know that nothing is likely to happen to her this early in the book, but the atmosphere still grabs us. And then she sees a man stepping out from behind a tree. She runs home in terror – but was she right to be terrified?

Helen is equally scared of threats within the house, particularly old Lady Warren, whom she suspects is not as helpless as she portrays herself…

“But you’re to sleep with me. You see, my dear, you’re not safe.”

As she smiled, Helen was suddenly reminded of the grin of a crocodile.

“I couldn’t pass a night alone with her,” she thought, even while she was conscious that her fear was only of her own creation. It was obviously absurd to be afraid of a poor bedridden old woman, with a diseased heart.

“I’m afraid I can do nothing without Miss Warren’s instructions,” she said.

“My step-daughter’s a fool. She doesn’t know what’s going on in this house. Trees always trying to get in…”

The next day, though, the fear ratchets up a notch. Another young woman is murdered, very close to home, and the household are sure the serial killer will strike again. It seems to be agreed that Helen is the most likely target. Some characters take a malicious joy in this warning, while others make it more companionably. Nurse Barker is in the former camp:

“Haven’t you noticed that the murderer always chooses girls who earn their own living? It looks as if he had a special grudge against them for taking work from men. Very likely he’s a shell-shock case, who came back from the War, to find a woman in his place. The country’s crawling with women, like maggots, eating up all the jobs. And the men are starved out.” 

The bulk of the novel takes place over the next evening and night, waiting to find out if the murderer will strike again. There is a wild storm outside. Initially, all members of the house agree they will close and bar the shutters and sit tight through the night – but gradually, one by one, they leave for a series of reasonable and unreasonable motives. Helen’s hope gets more and more fraught as the night goes on, the potential defenders disappear (or get deep drunk), and her imagination gets more and more out of hand. Her only other hope is Dr Parry, the local doctor who took an instant (and mutual) shine to her. But will he be able to get in, when the Professor has made everybody promise that not a soul will be let over the threshold during the night?

Ethel Lina White is on brilliant form. It is such a tense novel, with creeping dread created entirely from shadows and distant knocks and the sorts of things that do prey upon a fearful heart on a dark and stormy night. Indeed, it’s a genre most often found (in the 1930s, at least) in penny magazines and cheap paperbacks. Ethel Lina White takes the maiden-in-peril thriller and elevates it through her excellent writing. There are sections that are amusingly ironic, and her creation of character is more nuanced than you might expect. But it’s really, at its heart, a very well written tale of fear. White’s talents and her restraint (almost always – there is one ‘Oh, actually I was strangling myself‘ moment that made me roll my eyes) mean that Some Must Watch remains an effective, chilling tale when so many other examples of the genre feel like melodramatic period pieces.

I’m keen to watch The Spiral Staircase film, which inexplicably made Helen unable to speak. I don’t know where else it wanders from the plot, but it’s all been uploaded to YouTube so I will no doubt find out before too long!

I think I’d seen two different versions of the film The Lady Vanishes (the Hitchcock and the remake) before I knew it was a novel, and after that I tried to keep an eye out for it in bookshops. There was the small issue that at no point could I remember the title or the author. Even writing the heading to this post, I wasn’t sure whether it was The Wheel Spins or The Wheel Turns. Hitchcock knew what he was doing when he changed the title.

With my unreliable memory, I don’t recall the exact ins and outs of this adaptations, so I can’t say precisely how the book differs, but there certainly seemed to be some difference in tone. But I shan’t assume any prior knowledge on the part of the reader, you’ll be pleased to know. And we’ll quietly forget the films for the time being, excellent though they are.

Iris Carr starts off the novel coming to the end of a luxurious Italian holiday with a group of friends who are lively or obnoxiously boisterous, depending on whom you ask at the hotel. They head off back to England a little before she does, and she is left to ignore the other residents – from the vicar and wife who are keen to tell anybody about their children to the spinster ladies who strongly disapprove of youthful insouciance. They, in turn, are quite keen to keep out of anybody else’s business, for somewhat unlikely reasons that later become essential to the plot but (more rewardingly, to my mind) also lead later to my favourite lines in the book:

“You live in Somersetshire,” he remarked. “It is a county where I have stayed often. I wonder if we know any mutual friends.”

“I hate every single person living there,” said Miss Rose vehemently, sweeping away any claimants to friendship.

Iris, let us be honest, is not a particularly sympathetic woman. She seems unrepentantly selfish, quite rude, and snubs the overtures of friendship that are offered. She hopes, indeed, to travel back to England without them – but they do all end on the same train after all.

She is not, however, in their carriage – instead, after a curious incident of being knocked out briefly on the train platform – she squeezes herself into a carriage next to a friendly middle-aged lady, Miss Froy, and a peculiarly unfriendly set of others – including a formidable-looking baroness. Miss Froy is something of an adventurer (not, I assure you, an adventuress) and babbles away cheerily to Iris about her travel and exploits. It may not surprise you to learn that her response is to be pretty bored and inattentive, but she puts up with it for a while.

After Iris has had a quick nap, she wakes up to discover Miss Froy is missing… and when she asks the people in the carriage, they deny having ever seen her.

It’s an excellent premise for a novel (or a film), but it does require watertight plotting. At no point do we ever truly believe that Iris has imagined any of this – which I seem to recall felt like a possibility in the film – so, instead, we have to try to work out where Miss Froy is, and why everybody is lying.

One of those is answered very well (if not entirely unguessably – it felt obvious to me, knowing what happened, but perhaps it might not have done if I’d not seen the film); the other had a fair few holes, but none that let the novel down overall. And that was because White writes both engagingly and well. Indeed, her prose is more fluid, witty, and accomplished than many of the detective novelists of the period that I have read.

If her characterisation tends to caricature at times, she demonstrates greater nuance in Iris – who is an impressively believable combination of damsel in distress and determined sleuth, picking the most realistic elements from both stereotypes to create a non-stereotypical character. She actually behaves in a way that one might believe a person would behave, unlike 90% of thrillers – for The Wheel Spins often feels like it has crossed the line into thriller territory.

But my favourite elements were closer to normal: Miss Froy has two elderly parents – which came as a surprise, as I’d rather imagined her to be rather elderly herself until they appealed – and the narrative occasionally heads back to England to see them proudly and enthusiastically preparing for Miss F’s return. As is their adorable dog. It is all rather touching, and lends pathos that is often missing from high dramas. You can’t, for example, imagine Bulldog Drummond’s parents flicking through a photo album.

All in all, this is an endearing and enjoyable classic crime that was well-serviced by being turned into a Hitchcock film. Thank you Kirsty for lending it to me!