Thanks to the ongoing efforts of the wonderful British Library Crime Classics range, I have an improving impression of the work of Ethel Lina White — the excellent ‘Water Running Out’ (1927) was included in the Crimes of Cymru [ss] (2023) collection and The Wheel Spins (1936) was a superb little thriller which did well with its highly appealing setup. All of which saw me snap up a copy of The Spiral Staircase, a.k.a. Some Must Watch (1933) when one drifted into my orbit, and, well, this shows again how effective White can be with a small number of people in a restricted setting…even if, at times, she’d rather have them get together and talk over old ground instead of getting on with the story.

Nineteen year-old Helen Capel has accepted a job as a sort of maid-of-all-work at The Summit, the isolated country pile where the ageing Professor Warren lives with his sister and their bedridden stepmother.

No maid would stay at such a forsaken pocket — a pocket with a consequent hole in it — through which dribbled a steady stream of domestic labour.

When news reaches The Summit that a string of murders of four young women seems to lead in their direction, the Professor decides that the house shall be locked up for the night and no-one allowed ingress or egress, to keep everyone safe. But, slowly and inexorably, the passions, petty furies, and prides of the denizens of the house will see them depleted one by one, with Helen increasingly isolated and increasingly worried that the madman is heading straight for her.

The only thing I can really hold against this book is, as suggested up top, that White seems to choke the life out of its pacing at times by having Helen isolate herself with one of the remaining people in the house — cook Mrs. Oates, Nurse Barker, the bedridden Lady Warren — and for a lot of the same ground to be retrodden just so that we’re perfectly clear about the relationships which exist between them. Strip out maybe 40 of these 326 pages and this would be a far more compelling book (not that you’d ever say it drags…) whose excellent, atmospheric scene-setting…

Tattered leaves still clung to bare boughs, unpleasantly suggestive of rags of decaying flesh fluttering from a gibbet. A sluggish stream was clogged with dead leaves. Derelict litter of broken boots and rusty tins cropped out of a rank growth of docks and nettles, to mark a tramp’s camping-place.

…would be more concentrated.

The characters are, however, wonderful: the professor’s feckless son Newton forming a reluctant eternal triangle with his over-sexed wife Simone and the student Stephen Rice; the Oates couple supplying staunch support for Helen’s whims until Mrs. Oates’s fatal flaw is revealed and her behaviour becomes brusque and selfish; and the elderly Lady Warren is even more of a horror than the matriarch of the Greene household — at once bullying and feeble, and aware of her presence as an inconvenience in the grand scheme of things:

The household had waited so long for the old terror upstairs to die that it had grown to accept her as immortal.

White does well, too, not to lean too much into escalating the pitch of the piece with every single development (c.f. “Mrs. Oates’s reception of [the nearby murder] was disappointing. Instead of being thrilled with horror, she accepted it as though it were an item in the weekly schedule.”), allowing for the possibility that danger lurking behind every face might just be Helen’s own youthful fancy getting the best of her. And the idea that the killer is “likely…a shell-shock case who came back from the war to find a woman in his place” is dropped in with such magnificent aplomb that it took me a second to catch up to its implications.

The final stretch, then, lacked for me in being so long coming, but there are a couple of lovely moments when you realise how neatly everything has been developed, and, given the inclusion of a fair wedge of what feels like extraneous chatter, the decision to finish the book as White does is really rather brilliant. I wouldn’t say that White has impressed me as thoroughly as Charlotte Armstrong did in our first encounters, but on this evidence I can see that there’s definitely something to her writing which, when exploited well, would certainly be to my liking. I can’t say I’ll rush back to more of White’s novels, but when the mood catches me I can guarantee that more will feature on here in due course.

~

See also

Kate @ Cross-Examining Crime: [T]his is a story to read with the lights on, though if you’re anything like me, it’ll still leave you sitting on the edge of your seat. White’s depiction of human psychology is deftly done, showing how innocent and insignificant events can pave the way for a killer.

Fiction Fan: [I]n the end I’d recommend the short story [‘An Unlocked Window’ (1939)] far more highly than the book – it’s tighter and most of the extraneous stuff is stripped out, meaning that it works much more effectively as a chiller thriller. I can only think White herself must have felt that she could do better, so took the main plot points and created something much better.