Ethel Lina White (1876–1944)

Like her counterpart — though their approach was much different — across the pond in America, Cornell Woolrich, Ethel Lina White has fallen out of fashion in our day. Also like him, a number of her works were adapted for radio or film. Most notably, her 1934 book, Some Must Watch, was adapted by Robert Siodmak as The Spiral Staircase for film, and her 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins, was the loose basis for Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.

I had been wanting to read Wax for ages, mainly because I loved the short story it was cannibalized from. Raymond Chandler used to do the same with his own pulp stories, lengthening them, adding elements, and turning them into Marlowe novels. Here, however, I had the misfortune — for lack of a better word — to read Waxworks, the short story that gave birth to it, before I had read the novel. Because of this, White’s wonderfully descriptive prose in the novel became a hindrance for me. I liked the short story version so much, that all the characters and elements she used to alter it slightly in order to flesh it out into a full length novel, had me wishing she’d just get on with it. I suppose that’s an indication of how much I liked the shorter story, which was originally published during the Christmas season in 1930 by Pearson’s Magazine.

That being said, there is still a lot to like here, and if I’d come at it from the opposite direction, perhaps I’d have loved it. As it was, I liked it a lot. While it has some wonderfully atmospheric scenes, especially those set in the Waxwork Gallery, modern readers will probably fuss that it isn’t a paint by the numbers thriller, focusing solely on that element. This is old-fashioned suspense which has a lot of day-to-day life interspersed between the story. While the relationships and banter may seem inconsequential to many modern readers, they can be wonderful for those who enjoy an older style of storytelling, where the table setting is just as important as the meal.

There is a reason Ethel Lina White had such success in her day. If I had to recommend the novel or the short story, however, I’d recommend the short story. Since it is apparently only available — at least that I can find — in The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries put together by Otto Penzler, however, I suggest giving the novel Wax a go to see whether White’s style of writing, and her old-fashioned suspense, is your cup of tea or not.… (meer)

The Man Who Loved Lions by Ethel Lina White is a very strange story that takes place over the course of one evening. I was intrigued by the various plot points – a Gothic country house with a private zoo, a long planned reunion, and wartime blackouts. These, along with a varied mix of characters drew me in to the unusual story.

It is 1941 and our heroine, Ann has come to the country house of Ganges to reunite with a group of university acquaintances. Her main reason for coming is to meet up with Stephen, the man she has thought about for the last seven years. But the host of the reunion is a dark and twisted soul who seems to have other plans for the evening, and Ann is certain that someone is going to be murdered before the night is through. Unfortunately the story was a little too jumbled and convoluted to make much sense, but at the same time, I had to continue to read as I wanted to see how everything was going to pan out.

The Man Who Loved Lions is certainly an unusual story. We have characters tripping around in the dark avoiding the lions, tigers, bears and crocodiles while they exchange threats and warnings. The story was obviously leading the reader toward a murder but it took until the last 5 percent of book for a death to actually occur. As for Stephen, he didn’t show up until the last sentence.… (meer)

A rip-roaringly good yarn of suspense and tension on a train journey.
The movie adaptation diverges from the book in a number of ways. Some I think are improvements, some maybe not. I actually prefer the book's motive for the villains. But I prefer the characters in the movie. In the movie, some people are combined and some are replaced, and it just results in a tighter storyline and also some welcome comedic relief.
The tension in this book is really well done, especially because Miss Carr is truly, truly, truly on her own in this dilemma, to a degree beyond what the movie depicts. The book also gives her more of a back story to explain how it is that she's gotten so cut off from the support of other people.

Ultimately I thought it was a top-notch story from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and it completely holds its own against the more well-known authors from the 20's and 30's.… (meer)

This is the third crime novel I have read by this author who, for a brief period in the 1930s and early 40s was bracketed with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, but who is now all but forgotten. Her most famous novel (relatively speaking) was The Wheel Spins, which was the inspiration for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes film (one or two of her other novels were also adapted for Iess well known films). This one is about poison pen letters besmirching the reputations of ostensibly respectable community figures in a nameless idyllic village somewhere in "a hollow of the Downs" in the south of England. As sometimes with other novels written in the same era, the characters seem more outdated to me than those in some 19th century novels. The plot unravels fairly dramatically, with deaths and suicides following on from the early poison letters, and seemed more focused than one of her other novels I read last year, Wax. The mystery is eventually solved by an outside amateur sleuth. Quite a good read.… (meer)