This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Before Alfred Hitchcock made his name in Hollywood, he turned to the work of the British suspense novelist Ethel Lina White.
White was a powerhouse of the genre in the 1930s, publishing more than 100 short stories and 17 novels, three of which were adapted into films, most notably Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” (1938). That movie, filmed in England, was named one of the top 100 films of the 20th century by the British Film Institute. It won Hitchcock the best director award from the New York Film Critics Circle — one of the few awards he would ever win for his directing — and it was among the last films he made in England before he moved to Los Angeles.
“The Lady Vanishes” was based on White’s book “The Wheel Spins” (1936), a masterwork of horror and suspense that follows Iris Carr, an Englishwoman on holiday, who suffers a head injury before embarking on a train ride across Europe, where she engages in conversation with another Englishwoman, Miss Froy. When Miss Froy disappears, everyone on the train disavows any knowledge of the woman’s existence. “The Wheel Spins” cleverly puts the screws to poor Iris, teetering between sanity and madness as her continued investigations threaten to reveal an overarching conspiracy.
Even before the book was published, White had established herself with two of her greatest works: “Fear Stalks the Village” (1932), in which the peace of a small town is disrupted when anonymously written poison-pen letters leave death and destruction in their wake; and “Some Must Watch” (1933), in which a young, beautiful heroine who cannot speak fears she will be the next victim of a serial murderer who has been targeting disabled women.
White, whose books often centered on ordinary women who found themselves in peril, achieved commercial success. But she did not like to be noticed. In fact, when asked about her life, she told the crime writer and critic Peter Cheyney: “I was not born. I have never been educated and have no tastes or hobbies. This is my story and I’m sticking to it.”
The facts, however, suggest otherwise.
Ethel Lina White was born on April 2, 1876, in Abergavenny, Wales, one of three daughters of William White, a carpenter and laborer, and Charlotte Elizabeth White. She grew up on Frogmore Street in a mock Tudor-style house, known as Fairlea Grange, that would inspire settings in “Some Must Watch” and “Wax” (1935), a murder mystery set in a wax museum. In 2021, a plaque commemorating her legacy was placed at her childhood home, which still stands.
Little else is known about her childhood save for details she recounted in a letter to her publishing company, William Collins. She described her upbringing as “jolly” and wrote that books like “Little Women” and the magazine Harper’s Young People kept her company. She wrote that she was surrounded by “Welsh nursemaids, whose lurid stories were probably excellent training for a future thriller writer.”
What is known, however, is that White was writing from a very young age, and that by her teens she had already published poems and stories in a children’s magazine.
Her fate was sealed when she was paid 10 pounds by The Royal Magazine to publish her short story “An Advertisement Baby,” about a woman who poses as a destitute mother seeking donations, only to be outwitted by a clever nurse who uncovers that the baby she is toting is not hers. When the story was published in the magazine’s June 1906 edition, White turned more of her attention to writing.
After White’s mother died in 1917, and the family business, which had supported her and her sisters, was sold off, White moved to London, where she worked as a clerk for the Ministry of Pensions. She quit in 1919 to devote herself fully to fiction, and she published short stories from 1919 to 1926. “I couldn’t stand office life, because of the lack of fresh air,” she wrote.
Her first novels were romances. “The Wish-Bone” (1927) took its storytelling cues from Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” while “’Twill Soon Be Dark” (1929) and “The Eternal Journey” (1930) were in literary conversation with Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. When the bottom dropped out of the romance market, White switched to suspense.
It was a wonder she got any writing done. “My method of working is so weird that it is a mystery to me that there really is a novel to show for it,” she wrote to her publisher.
She went on to outline a typical day: “I begin, about 12, with writing materials, write a few lines, then get a glass of water — another line or so — smoke a cigarette — another line — play with the kitten — and then break for a cup of tea. But somehow, a book does get written.”
The scholar Alex Csurko described White’s innovative approach to suspense in a paper: “She took a style in its infancy and added so many threads of classical literature to it.”
For example, in the preface to “Put Out the Light” (1931), a Gothic suspense story featuring a controlling spinster, she explained: “Most stories of crime begin with a murder and end with its solution. But as the victim is the dominant character in this novel, she has been retained as long as possible.” White suspected, she wrote, that readers might decide who killed the main character “before the murder is actually committed. They will probably reach the goal before the detective, who is built to last and not for speed.”
It was little wonder Alfred Hitchcock was attracted to her work. “The Lady Vanishes,” with a script written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder and with Margaret Lockwood as Iris, became an instant hit. It was among the most successful British films of its time, and it was popular in America as well. Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times gave it a rave review, while the Guardian film critic Philip French, writing in 2012, called it “one of the greatest train movies from the genre’s golden era.” (White’s original novel was adapted into a film again in 1979, starring Elliott Gould and Cybill Shepherd, and by the BBC for television in 2013.)
White attended a screening of the film in her hometown on Feb. 20, 1939, when she was invited onstage by the mayor. She accepted his congratulations but in her typical demure style said that she was present only because she “did not take up much room.”
White published nine more novels. Her other film adaptations were “Her Heart in Her Throat” (1942), which was adapted in part by Raymond Chandler into “The Unseen” (1945), and “The Spiral Staircase” (1946), a noir chiller directed by Robert Siodmak that was based on “Some Must Watch.”
But she died on Aug. 13, 1944, in London before either film was released. She was 68. The cause was ovarian cancer.
White left all of her worldly belongings to her younger sister Annis, along with a rather macabre missive in her will, born out of a pathological lifelong fear of being buried alive: “I give and bequeath unto Annis Dora White all that I possess on condition she pays a qualified surgeon to plunge a knife into my heart after death.”
