The Spiral Staircase

Helen Capel is hired as a live-in lady-help to the Warren family in the countryside. She enjoys the eccentric household and her duties, but her peaceful and simple life is soon disturbed by a series of mysterious murders in the isolated community.

As Helen’s employer, Professor Sebastian Warren, battens down the hatches and locks all the doors of their remote country house, the eight residents begin to feel safe. But somewhere out there lurks a murderer of young girls. As the murders crawl closer to home, Helen starts to wonder if there really is safety in numbers—and what happens when those numbers start to dwindle?

About the Author
Novelist and short story writer Ethel White was born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876. She worked for the government at the Ministry of Pensions in London and began writing fiction in the 1920s. She made her writing debut with the mainstream novel The Wish-Bone (1927). After two more mainstream novels, Twill Soon Be Dark (1929) and The Eternal Journey (1930), she began writing thriller and mystery novels, where her popularity flourished for the next 14 years.

Her novel The Spiral Staircase was made into a film by director Robert Sidomark, but White's best-known and most successful work remains The Wheel Spins, on which Hitchcock based his film The Lady Vanishes. The Lady Vanishes was remade in the 1970s and starred Cybil Shepherd. More recently, The Lady Vanishes has enjoyed a successful run as a play.