Also like him, a number of her works were adapted for radio or film. Like her counterpart - though their approach was much different - across the pond in America, Cornell Woolrich, Ethel Lina White has fallen out of fashion in our day. 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. Although she has now faded into obscurity, in her day she was as well known as such writers like Dorothy L. Her first crime novel, published in 1931, was Put Out the Light.

Her first three works, published between 19, were mainstream novels. Her writing was to make her one of the best known crime writers in Britain and the USA during the 1930s and '40s. She left employment in a government job working for the Ministry of Pensions in order to pursue writing. Later she began to write short stories, but it was some years before she wrote books. moments of authentic gooseflesh.” – Compton MackenzieĮthel 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.īorn in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876, White started writing as a child, contributing essays and poems to children's papers.

“Gave me the best thrill I have had for some time. “White has mastered the difficult art of writing a mystery-horror tale.” – New York Times “A really notable achievement in the macabre.” – Time and Tide

This new edition of Wax (1935), a brilliant mixture of horror and mystery, is the first in decades and reproduces the original jacket art. One of the most popular crime novelists of the 1930s and ’40s, Ethel Lina White (1876-1944) is best known as the author of the books that inspired the films The Spiral Staircase and The Lady Vanishes. For slowly, ever so slowly, the horrible wax figures seem to be coming to life. Surrounded by gruesome wax figures of madmen and murderers in the evil chamber where someone has already met his death, Sonia suddenly feels terror grip her. So she resolves to spend a night there alone. Sonia Thompson, a young journalist, is determined to get to the bottom of the strange happenings at the waxworks. On the outskirts of the small English town of Riverpool stands a waxwork museum, where several people have died under mysterious circumstances.

Wax by Ethel Lina White