Ethel Lina White

Ethel Lina White (1876 – 13 August 1944) was a British crime writer, best known for her novel The Wheel Spins (1936), on which the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes (1938), was based.

Early years

Born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876,^[1] White started writing as a child, contributing essays and poems to children's papers. Later she began to write short stories, but it was some years before she wrote books.

Career as a writer

She left employment in a government job working for the Ministry of Pensions in order to pursue writing. Her writing was to make her one of the best known crime writers in Britain and the USA during the 1930s and '40s.

Her first three works, published between 1927 and 1930, were mainstream novels. Her first crime novel, published in 1931, was Put Out the Light. Although she has now faded into obscurity, in her day she was as well known as such writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie.

Death

She died in London in 1944 aged 68. Her works have enjoyed a revival in recent years with a stage adaptation of The Lady Vanishes touring the UK in 2001 and the BBC broadcast of an abridged version on BBC Radio 4 as well as a TV adaptation by the BBC in 2013. Also, many of her works previously unavailable have recently been published for Amazon Kindle.

Bibliography

• The Wish-Bone (1927)
• Twill Soon Be Dark (1929)
• The Eternal Journey (1930)
• Put Out the Light (1931)
• Fear Stalks the Village (1932)
• Some Must Watch (1933) (filmed in 1946 as The Spiral Staircase, remade under the same title in 1975, and again for TV in 2000)
• Wax (1935)
• The First Time He Died (1935)
• The Wheel Spins (1936) (filmed in 1938 by Alfred Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes, remade in 1979 and again for TV in 2013.)^{[Note 1]}
• The Third Eye (1937)
• The Elephant Never Forgets (1937)
• Step in the Dark (1938)
• While She Sleeps (1940)
• She Faded into Air (1941)
• Midnight House (U.S. title Her Heart in Her Throat, 1942, filmed in 1945 as The Unseen)
• The Man Who Loved Lions (U.S. title The Man Who Was Not There, 1943)
• They See in Darkness (1944)

Short Stories

• Cheese (can be found in Capital Crimes - Edited by Martin Edwards)
• Waxworks (can be found in Silent Nights - Christmas Mysteries - Edited by Martin Edwards)
• Old Man River (can be found in Best Mystery Stories - published in 1930 by Faber & Faber it was first published in Pearson's Magazine)

References

Notes

1. The novel was serialised in six weekly 15 minute parts, read by Brenda Blethyn, from 7 March 2008 on BBC Radio 2.

Citations

1. Abergavenny Local History Society

External links

• Works by Ethel Lina White at Project Gutenberg Australia
• Ethel Lina White on IMDb