EIRF

#1344: The Spiral Staircase, a.k.a. Some Must Watch (1933) by Ethel Lina White

/ JJ / 4 Comments


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.

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#551: The White Cockatoo (1934) by M.G. Eberhart

/ JJ / 46 Comments

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Sometimes quality and taste do not overlap.  For instance, I have every reason to believe that The White Cockatoo (1934) by Mignon G. Eberhart is a very good book, but given that it veers far more heavily into the suspense/HIBK/EIRF schools of writing rather than anything qualifing as detection it’s not especially to my taste.  It’s well- (if perhaps a little over-) written, has some good atmosphere, and introduces in the eponymous bird Pucci an unusual twist that enlivens the eventual resolution…but amidst all the mysterious happenings — sinister hotelier, sinister guests, sinister wind, sinister banging shutters, sinister everything — it’s just a bit too bland for my palate.

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#133: Everything is Rather Frightening in The Black Rustle (1943) by Constance and Gwenyth Little

/ JJ / 15 Comments

Over at the excellent and superbly-titled Exploring the History of Women in Mystery blog, wrangler “Unpredictable Notes” recently put up this brief summary of the EIRF school as outlined in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1971).  EIRF is a step on from HIBK (Had I But Known) and stands for Everything is Rather Frightening:

In fact, since the modern psychological novel has devoted itself to exploring the abnormal and oddly alarming, no great originality was needed to raise the emotional pitch of the murder another notch and made HIBK into EIRF – Everything is Rather Frightening.

This is a new one on me but, by the same serendipity that seems to manifest itself throughout my blogging, I was reading The Black Rustle — one of the middle period novels from the Little sisters — when I encountered this lexicon, and it struck me how perfectly all the Littles’ books fall into this categorisation.

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