The Spiral Staircase by Ethel Lina White – #ReadingWales25

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!