Customer Reviews

While She Sleeps

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I suspect Ethel Lina White is chiefly remembered -if at all-for her association with Alfred Hitchcock whose superb movie The Lady Vanishes was adapted from her novel The Wheel Spins .She was a member of the crime writing school typically described as the "had I but known "school.She wrote tales of imperilled youung women menaced by person or persons unknown and escaping by luck more than good judgement .

This 1940 book revolves around a plot by a criminal named Clarence Club to frame a former partner ,Henry Watkins for murder after Watkins betrays him to the police .He proposes to murder a woman he does not know and stick the blame on Watkins .The selected victim is a woman of independent means named Miss Loveapple(we never learn her first name )who is going to be in her London home alone on the night of September 13th after she returns from holiday in Switzerland .This is an okay notion for a book -a bit "Strangers On A Train "-like .The problem is we only learn that that is what is going on when the book has reached just over the halfway mark .Until then there is much tedious business about Miss Loveapple's life and domestic arrangements in a tranquil Sussex village and vague hints about some dark deeed afoot
Once we learn of the deed we are transported to Switzerland and the attempts by a pair of low rent crooks to steal her(non existent )jewellry under the impression (mistaken)that she is a trusted maid to an aristocrat who has given her the jewels to hold as a decoy.The tone strived for is humour;the result achieved is tedium .
It does not work as thriller ;it does not work as social comedy.It just plain does not work and the book is best left undisturbed on the shelves unless you are a devotee of crime writing from that era -but be advised it is well short of Christie and even Sayers standards amonmg that era's authors