Fear Stalks the Village (1932) by Ethel Lina White

Ethel Lina White was a British writer from Abergavenny, Wales, who started out writing short stories and mainstream novels, before not unsuccessfully trying her hands at crime fiction with Some Must Watch (1933) and The Wheel Spins (1936) earning her some lasting fame – which were both turned into popular movies. The Wheel Spins was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into the 1938 film The Lady Vanishes. So her work tends to be linked to the atmospheric, character-driven suspense mysteries of American writers like Mary Roberts Rinehart, Mignon G. Eberhart and Mabel Seeley. Robert Adey even listed two of White's novels in Locked Room Murders (1991).

So you would think White's contributions to the impossible crime genre was going to be my first stop, but have been rather curious about one of her lesser-known, non-impossible crime mystery novels.

Last year, the British Library reprinted White's Fear Stalks the Village (1932) as part of their ongoing Crime Classics series. Martin Edwards wrote a short, but insightful, introduction describing the book as an early example of the poison pen letter depicting "the slow, remorseless destruction of bonds of trust and affection between the villagers" – complimented by "a pleasing slow-burn puzzle." I've read some good things about Fear Stalks the Village and the reprint was favorably received, which made the top 10 of the 2024 Reprint of the Year Award. It certainly is one of the most striking of the 1930s village mysteries.

The village in question is a remote, out of the way place with no railway connection, but the flower gardens, honeysuckle-twined lanes, cobbled streets lined with Tudor cottages makes it a small slice of heaven. It's said that "even Death seldom knocked at its doors, for the natives resented the mere idea of dying in such a delightful place." So a place where visitors become residents over time, but a snake has slithered into this garden paradise. A snake of the venomous variety who spreads its poison through anonymous letters.

Miss Decima Asprey, elderly spinster and queen of the village, is the first to receive an anonymous poison pen letter attacking her moral character. She shares it with the village priest and it was supposed to be kept between them, but they were overheard by the parlor maid. And, within a day, it was public knowledge Miss Asprey had received a poison pen letter slandering her character. The first to fall under suspicion is the local writer of schoolboy adventure serials, Miss Julia Corner, who's first garden party of the season ends disastrous when she brings up the anonymous letter. Miss Corner was the first to experience the "social frost" as invitations for tea or garden parties stopped coming, which made the initial fear and suspicion subside – until a second poison pen letter is delivered. Followed by a tragic death and an inquest. So the Reverend Simon Blake calls in his friend, Ignatius Brown, who's "one of the idle rich" and "rather fancies himself as Sherlock Holmes" to do a bit of sleuthing.

Ignatius Brown arrives in the village to witness firsthand how the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and a morbid dread of scandal has on the social fabric of village life. Everyone is suspicious of their own neighbor. Social gatherings come to a grinding halt "as though they knew subconsciously that so long as they did not gather together in numbers they were safe from the herd-instinct to panic at a chance shot." This is slow-burn suspense mystery and Brown is not able to prevent more tragedies from happening as the village continues to unravel, before he can put a stop to the "secret sadist" terrorizing a once nearly fairytale-like village.

However, while there are a number of deaths, White boldly decided to make this 1932 mystery novel completely murderless. Fear Stalks the Village focuses entirely on the poison pen letters and their corrosive effect on not only their recipients, but on the village community as a whole. So this village mystery is more about the salting and poisoning of the social strata of a small, isolated village sparring nobody than the effects of a murder of an individual on a close-knit community. Fear Stalks the Village is something off the beaten path for an early 1930s village mystery, which had only just began to emerge and perhaps the reason why it reads like a book written decades later. Shirley Jackson's short poison pen story, "The Possibility of Evil" (1965), comes to mind. That's also reflected in the ending.

Fear Stalks the Village is, as noted before, a very slow-moving story taking place under lazy summer sun or "flushed in sunset afterglow" as the anonymous letter writer slowly poisons the village – one letter at a time. Something you can only get away with when there's a worthy payoff at the end and White delivered as Brown revealed there was more complexity behind how the poison pen letters started. That earned it a status as an oddly cut gem of the British village mystery. On the other hand, Brown can only prevent further damage and precious little to get justice for the people who took their own life. Whatever the ending suggested, it's unlikely the end of the poison pen letters restored the village to its previous state.

Fear Stalks the Village is one of the most unusual, leisurely-paced, but strangely mesmerizing, mystery thrillers from the British Golden Age. Recommended as something pleasantly different. But let the reader be warned... if you want your detective story to get on with it and present a clearly murdered corpse in the first couple of chapters, you're best advised to give this one a pass.