The Lady Vanishes by Ethel Lina White

The Wheel Spins and The Lady Vanishes. This classic mystery is best known as the basis of the 1938 Alfred Hitchcock film, but this original story feels even more sinister and claustrophobic. If you have seen it, this is not that story.

Iris Carr is an attractive young lady of means, the sort of society girl who appears in popular magazines. Returning to England from Italy, she arrives at the station with several other passengers: two proper spinster sisters, the Reverend and his wife, a honeymoon couple, and a bandaged medical patient watched over by a doctor and a nun. Fighting a bout of sunstroke, Iris jumps into a departing carriage of the Trieste Express occupied by a Baroness, a couple with their daughter, and a fashionable model. The other woman facing her is completely nondescript; indefinite age and features, oatmeal hair and tweeds. Miss Froy is an English governess heading home, and they are seen sharing tea in the dining car by everyone. When, after a nap, Iris finds both Miss Froy and her suitcase gone, she is told "there has been no English lady, here, in this carriage, never, at any time, except you."

Iris begins an exhaustive search for her new friend, aided by two men she meets, a professor and Max, a young engineer eager to help. There are no witnesses. Every passenger saw Miss Froy but, for reasons of their own, deny it. So many strangers cannot conspire to lie; perhaps she should give it a rest. Finally, they hear Miss Froy has returned - but she is an imposter!

Iris is plunged into a psychological scheme so monstrous she cannot believe it. Luckily, Max is by her side, and already she means everything to him. It is often simpler to believe we are all what we seem to be, but underneath, everyone has a secret to conceal. The climax of the Hitchcock film features a shootout between spies and a secret code, but in this original, the wheels spin and the train never stops. What happens to innocent Miss Froy is even more diabolically sinister.

Written as The Wheel Spins in 1936, it has been adapted for radio and filmed three times: notably as Hitchcock's breakthrough film (ranked #31 of the best British films ever), in 1979 with Cybill Shepherd and Elliott Gould, and for TV in 2013.

1936 / Tradeback / 288 pages