In 1938, Alfred Hitchcock released The Lady Vanishes, a film based on a book by Ethel Lina White, The Wheel Spins. The book was published in 1936. The film differs in many ways from the book, but having seen the film before, several times, I knew the basic premise of book. A young woman, Iris, meets an older lady while traveling on a train. They have tea and talk for a while, and then, Iris takes a nap. When she awakens, Miss Froy, the older woman, has disappeared, and the other people in the same carriage deny that there ever was a Miss Froy in the carriage.
Iris frantically searches for the woman Miss Froy, and can not find her. When she asks other passengers on the train to comfirm that they saw her, no one will admit that she exists. Even other English passengers on the train from the hotel, who had seen Miss Froy on the train, deny that they saw her. They each have their own reasons, but that doesn't help Iris.
The panic she feels when no one believes her or will listen to her is palpable. For various reasons, she lets herself be convinced that she imagined the old lady, that she was having hallucinations. The only other explanation is that there is a conspiracy afoot to cover up Miss Froy's absence, which seems ridiculous.
My thoughts...
This is a mystery, but it is also a character study and full of psychological suspense, with a bit of romance thrown in. It is hard for me to judge how much I was affected by previous viewings of the film when reading this book. I think it did cut down on some of the tension. I enjoyed reading the book and I preferred it to the film, if only because the characters are better developed.
The novel explored Iris's character and psychology. As the book opens, she is at the hotel, a remote vacation spot in Europe, with a large group of friends. She is kind of flighty, does not have a lot of self-confidence, drifts into relationships. The friends are artificial, obnoxious, and shallow, and she grows tired of them. She decides not to leave the resort when they leave, but to wait until a day or two later. Thus when she runs into trouble on the train, she is alone and has no one to turn to. She does eventually find a young man her age who helps her out. Iris's behavior matures on this trip. She wants to throw off the superficiality of her previous life.
I also liked that the book gives us brief glimpses of Miss Froy's family at home, with her parents and her dog eagerly awaiting her return from her governess job for a government official in a distant country.
We watched the 1938 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave, again after I finished the novel. I enjoyed it as usual, although I noticed the changes to the story this time around. There is much more humor in the film, and the blossoming romance between Iris and a young man on the train is more believable. All the characters are different from the book. The ending is more tense and more thrillerish.
The edition I read contained this novel plus one other by Ethel Lina White, The Spiral Staircase, which was first published as Some Must Watch in 1933.
Also see:
Christine Poulson's post at A Reading Life on Ethel Lina White and her career, titled A Forgotten Woman Crime Novelist.
Reviews at Clothes in Books, FictionFan's Book Reviews, and Crossexaminingcrime.
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Publisher: Wordsworth Classics, 2015 (orig. publ. 1936)
Length: 157 pages (of tiny print)
Format: Trade paperback
Setting: Train trip through Europe
Source: I purchased my copy in 2017.
