The wheel spins

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Best known as the basis for Hitchcock's classic early film, The Lady Vanishes, Ethel White's The Wheel Spins is a gripping and accomplished work in its own right. The plot is deceptively simple, and the premise-a woman meets a mysterious stranger during a long railway journey-is classic. It's easy to see why Hitchcock found this novel so compelling and so well-suited to his particular brand of filmmaking.The protagonist of the story is a young woman named Iris Carr, who suffers a blackout just before she is to board her train for a railway journey across Europe to London. It is an ominous beginning to what will be a very disturbing trip. On board, the still-woozy Iris befriends Mrs. Froy, a fellow Englishwoman who is a little eccentric, but who seems mostly agreeable and benign. Mrs. Froy is the "Vanishing Lady" of Hitchcock's title, and she mysteriously disappears while Iris is napping. Her inexplicable departure throws Iris into a mind-bending mystery that will make her alternately question her sanity and the designs of the people around her. For when she asks about the vanished Mrs. Froy, everyone on board the train adamantly denies ever having seen the old woman. Although Iris is tempted to believe that Mrs. Froy must have been merely a vivid hallucination, perhaps an aftereffect of sunstroke, a few stray, inexplicable details suggest that something much more sinister may be going on...Gripping as the plot is, the novel's true strength is the masterful way in which White subtly builds tension and creates a brooding, ominous atmosphere that hangs over even the most ordinary scenes. She has, therefore, been compared to Edgar Allan Poe, although White also has much in common with Wilkie Collins, Patricia Highsmith and Mary Higgins Clark. Unlike traditional mystery stories or whodunits, which generally open with a crime, White's novels trade on our anticipation of a future transgression and the eventual explanation of unusual events. As a result, The Wheel Spins is charged with an electric atmosphere of expectancy that keeps the reader captivated from beginning to end.