Ambling along the lanes of a sleepy village in the Downs, passing cosy Tudor cottages rustling with wisteria, a novelist imagines the sordid truth hidden behind the quaint, rustic facade. Her musings are confirmed when a spate of anonymous poison pen letters shocks the community, turning neighbour against neighbour and embroiling everyone from the rector and the ‘queen of the village’ Decima Asprey to the high-born Scudamores. With venom in the air, the perpetrator a mystery and dark secrets threatening to come to light, a shadow of shame and scandal stretches over the parish, with death and disaster following in its wake.
Revelling in the wickedness that lies beneath the idyllic veneer of village life, White’s 1932 mystery is an inventive interwar classic and remains one of the foundation stones of the village mystery sub-genre of crime fiction.
Ethel Lina White (1876–1944) was an author from Abergavenny whose novels and short stories in the crime, suspense and horror genres were immensely popular during the 1930s and 1940s. Though she remains well-known as the writer of The Wheel Spins, also republished in the British Library Crime Classics series in 2023, she was an influential figure in the Golden Age of crime fiction whose reputation, in her heyday, rivalled those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers.
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