The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

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Good morning, Sarah. We don’t usually record in the morning.

Sarah Harrison  01:37
No, and our guest isn’t recording in the morning.

Carolyn Daughters  01:41
It is 5pm where our guest is at the moment.

Sarah Harrison  01:45
Alex, where are you located?

Alex Csurko  01:48
I’m located in South Yorkshire in England.

Sarah Harrison  01:51
We have an international guest for you.

Carolyn Daughters  01:54
Yes, our guest today is Alex Csurko. He is the perfect person to bring on to discuss Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins. We have a listener of the episode, which is something that we do, and we just did a book giveaway. We interviewed Christine Carbo recently. It was a wonderful interview about her Glacier National Park series. It’s so good. We’re giving away a copy of A Sharp Solitude and in our book giveaway contest, our winner is Nancy Moses of Hebron, Kentucky. Congratulations, Nancy!

Sarah Harrison  02:44
Watch our social media channels. Go ahead and do the things we ask you to do.

Carolyn Daughters  02:51
And then you can be in the running for the book giveaways, because it’s fun, you know? I mean, I love getting a book in the mail. Frankly, I love receiving anything that is not a bill.

Sarah Harrison  03:04
I’m going to introduce The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White for you today. It’s a bit tough to find, so if you’re having trouble finding it, I put a link to our Amazon store. Iris Carr’s holiday in the mountains of a remote corner of Europe has come to an end, and she faces the Journey Home Alone, without her friends, stricken by sunstroke at the station, Iris catches the express train to Trieste by the skin of her teeth and finds a companion in Miss Froy, an affable English governess. But when Iris passes out and reawakens, Miss Froy is nowhere to be found, the other passengers deny any knowledge of her existence, and as the train speeds across Europe, Iris spirals deeper and deeper into a strange and dangerous conspiracy. First published in 1936 and adapted for the screen as The Lady Vanishes by Alfred Hitchcock in 1938, Ethel Lina White’s suspenseful mystery remains her best known novel, worthy of acknowledgement as a classic of The genre in its own right.

Carolyn Daughters  04:22
To talk about The Wheel Spins today, we have a guest, Alex Csurko. He’s writing his PhD thesis on Welsh-born interwar writer Ethel Lina White, whom he first discovered during his undergraduate studies on Alfred Hitchcock. Alex is recognized as an up-and-coming authority on Ethel Lina White after his 2021 interview with BBC Wales online discussing the author’s life and work. In 2023, he contributed an extensive biography on White for the Gwent local history journal. Most recently, he collaborated with Tony medwar on the short story collection Blackout and Other Stories to be published by Crippen and landreau in 2025. Alex also regularly contributes theoretical essays on the craft of magic for the society’s prestigious international magazine. Welcome, Alex! Thanks for joining us.

Alex Csurko  05:19
You’re welcome. It’s nice to be here.

Sarah Harrison  05:22
I have so many questions about your bio. Honestly, yes, hard person to find. I we were looking online, looking for Ethel Lina White experts to have on as a guest, and I wasn’t coming up with any. I wanted to ask you, are you the only one? Are there other experts that you’re aware of from all of your research?

Alex Csurko  05:47
I wouldn’t go as far as to say there’s any experts, but then again, but then again, I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’m an expert. I think I’m an expert by the mere fact that I’m the only one doing anything about it. Really, I’m doing a PhD on, I am aware of, I have a friend who’s also in England. She’s doing a Masters on Ethel Lina White, okay, so there is, there is two others, but no, mainly it’s people in Abergavenny, where she grew up researching because she’s a local author down there, and people like Tony medwell, Martin Edwards, who are reprinting the short stories. Great. Well, there is a network of people interested in Ethel Lina White that actually doing what you would say, academic research on her. Yes, I’m the only one and a friend?

Sarah Harrison  06:43
You guys better be friends. It’d be terrible. Oh yes, the only two

Carolyn Daughters  06:49
competitive at the Ethel Lina White research.

Sarah Harrison  06:55
Well, thanks so much for joining us, and I’m going to ask more questions about that in our second episode, but The Wheel Spins, that was a great book. I have to say, I loved it.

Carolyn Daughters  07:06
I did too. It was really fun to read. I had never heard of her before, and I really enjoyed The Wheel Spins. I had seen the Hitchcock version of the movie many, many years ago, had not known it had been based on any book. So this all came as a surprise to me, and how I Where do we start this conversation? Who is this author, and why have we not heard of her?

Sarah Harrison  07:35
I want to know a little bit about your journey, because I’m guessing if you studied Hitchcock, and that was your entrance into Ethel Lina White. Was that movie in this book your introduction to her? Or what was the path there?

Alex Csurko  07:49
Well, Hitchcock and The Lady Vanishes (The Wheel Spins) was discussed quite a lot in my undergrad work, and to be honest, stumbling into Ethel’s other works was complete chance I was doing my Masters, and I thought, I’ll carry on the Hitchcock trend. I’ll do the adaptation. So I bought all the books that the films were based on, which included The Lady Vanishes as it’s now known. And that fell through. I did something completely different from my masters. And then I’m thinking, right? I want to do a PhD. Who do I do it on? And my initial I looked at all the books on the Hitchcock shelf because I’d bought them, man as well use them. Looked across Daphne du Maurier, loads of books because he did The Birds, Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, so I thought, I’ll do Daphne du Maurier. And then I looked on Google Scholar just to get an idea how much work had been out there, loads, uh huh. So I thought, Well, I’m not there’s going to be no originality there on my part. So went back through the Hitchcock books. The Lady Vanishes. Let’s have a look. Absolutely nothing on her. That is the perfect introduction for a PhD she needs, and also reading the books, as you’ll probably agree, she is somebody that deserves recognition, somebody that deserves study. And to be honest, stuff that I found in my dissertation and all through other research is stuff that, well, let’s just say that she’s a better writer than I initially thought.

Carolyn Daughters  09:24
She really is. I was surprised, even from the first chapter, how much I enjoyed her writing. And at one point, there are these spinster, elderly sisters in The Wheel Spins, and one of them talks about a muddle, and it immediately made me think this book in parts, not beginning to end, but in parts. Reminded me a little bit of Ian Forrester and his voice and the way he tells stories. Now she is going to tell a story very differently than Ian Forrester, but there, when I saw that word. Muddle. I thought there. I don’t know, there were undertones or inklings of somebody who is really, truly in possession of the skill required to tell a story, where a character we meet in the first chapter, we may not like all that much, but who I can say from my perspective, was really complicated and who I liked quite well by the end of the book, it takes some skill as a writer to be able to pull that off.

Sarah Harrison  10:30
We’ve read a lot of books at this point with unlikable characters. But that was an iris. She had her unlikable traits, I thought, but her bad manners were malicious. They were just a little bit naive. And her good qualities, I felt like, weren’t also intrinsic. They were a little bit nice. Sure she was a very good girl. What did you think about Iris? Alex? How do you like her or dislike her?

Alex Csurko  11:02
Well, I like her as a character overall. And it’s interesting that you started the conversation with the Mrs. Flood Porters. They’re the spinster couple, because there’s, I’ve reread The Wheel Spins in preparation for this podcast, and I found a quote that perfectly sums up the argument of is Iris an unlikable character. Oh, great. And it’s Miss Rose, when just this is before they get on the train and everything kicks off with Miss Froy, and she says, Well, is she interested in you or in us? That sort of girl is utterly selfish. She wouldn’t raise a finger or go an inch out of a way to help anyone. And the irony is, she’s the only one that goes out of her way. Try and help. Miss Roy. So I think, as a reader, you begin the book, hearing the word social, sorry, reading the word I’m thinking of the film there, reading the word socialite, you instantly get all these prejudices, and you see them because you told them. But then when you look in retrospect over the narrative and what are the other characters said, and their Englishness and their stiff upper lip, you start to realize that maybe the distinction between good, bad, likable, unlikable is not as clear cut.

Sarah Harrison  12:22
Yes, exactly, it was. There was so much layered irony. That’s a terrific quote that you pulled because Iris was totally selfish. Sure, when she started looking for Miss Froy. I got the sense that she was doing it just because she didn’t want to be called crazy. She’s like, No, I am right. And she got her hackles up, and she had already alienated and been actually rude to all of the other hotel guests. So they’re right there. And while they were friendly, they were friendly within their own class or within their type of people, but they were also very comfortable. So when it came down to it, they wouldn’t lift a finger for someone that they didn’t already know and agree with.

Carolyn Daughters  13:17
At the start of The Wheel Spins, they’re in this picturesque sort of area of Europe, and I can’t remember how it was described. It’s it’s not described as picturesque, per se. It’s picturesque squalor in a remote corner of Europe, which may or may not have been Croatia, but some, some part that is maybe less traveled than, say, Rome or Paris, London. And she’s with our protagonist, Iris cars with her friends, and they are really creating a ruckus at this small establishment where they’re staying there and they are called by the other guests, near nudists, drunken, there’s all kinds of noise all hours of the night. They have very bad manners, in particular for English people, from the other English guests, pointing to them and saying, this is terrible that these, this group, is behaving in this way. And then we also see her hiking at one point after her friends have left, and she stubbornly climbs 5000 feet up a mountain, which is quite a climb, and gets lost and runs into a peasant man who she seems to think is a stupid man, and tries to speak to him in English, and is frustrated he cannot speak English back to her and the author, the narrator, does this amazing thing where she lets us into how other people perceive. Iris Carr. And then she even says, The peasant man heard only a string of gibberish. He saw a girl dressed like a man who was unattractively skinny, according to the local standard of beauty, with cut, dirty knees. She was a foreigner. Further, she was worked up to a pitch of excitement and was exceptionally stupid. And I loved that we were able to get these other perspectives of iris so she didn’t seem like our hero or our heroine from the start, which makes her character arc, for me, so much more interesting throughout The Wheel Spins. Can you talk a little bit about this arc? Alex, from this arc of of Iris Carr, from beginning to end.

Alex Csurko  15:47
From how I’ve interpreted it, is split into three soon as you get on the train, as I said, you’ve got all these prejudices. And you’re right. You’ve seen it from the foreigners point of view. You’ve seen it from the other English point of view. You’re getting a lot of different interpretations of Iris car, but then as soon as you’ll get on that train, you are left to your own devices as to, is she good? Is she bad? Is she crazy? Is she not? Who’s good, who’s bad, who can be trusted, who can’t? And as I said, there’s three stages, and you can identify it within chapters, to the point where Miss Froy disappears. You are focalized through Iris car. She’s just had sunstroke, she’s delirious, she’s tired. She’s not that bothered about, I think they have tea or a bite to eat. I can’t remember that bit. And when she disappears, for all intents and purposes, she could have been a delusion. Just because it’s written in just because it’s written by Ethel Lina White, does not mean that she exists. There’s a similar argument to the film, but I’ll mention that later. And then there comes the decisive point in the narrative, after she’s got the professor and Max involved, and she says, you’ve won. There is no Miss Froy. And I call that end of Act One. Next chapter begins. Mrs. Froy would have been furious had she known that anyone down to do a reality?

Sarah Harrison  17:21
Yeah, great switch.

Alex Csurko  17:25
Instantly, the reader is brought in on the secret Miss Froy. Is Iris is telling the truth. Only trouble is the situation on the train is exactly the same. So now we’re into phase two, which is dramatic irony. We know that everybody’s right. Well, I don’t say everybody’s wrong, because everybody did actually see her. They’re all keeping that information for their own agenda, but from the professor and Max’s point of view, they are right to think that Miss Freud does not exist, because there is absolutely no evidence that she existed. So the dramatic irony is in full swing up until, and I can’t find the chapter. I should have really pinpointed it up until the signature on the window, which is in the film as well. So anybody that’s in the film will know that moment. And then it’s when Iris knows I am right. When you said earlier that, she’s very adamant, to the point of forgot the word that you use, but to the point of being so aggressive, it’s like, no, I am right, believe me, to a certain extent, as soon as you get I think it’s chapter 18, when you realize that she is real, you start looking back and thinking, Why is nobody believing her? And then you start to sympathize.

Carolyn Daughters  18:38
Ethel Lina White then is making a choice in The Wheel Spins by introducing Mr. and Mrs. Froy and telling the reader, hey, reader, this is the deal. They exist. Their daughter exists. Their daughter is missing. The author could have done something completely different and left the reader questioning, and then we would have been in the position of many of the other guests on the train, passengers on the train. Why do you think Ethel Lina White made that choice to let readers in on the truth?

Alex Csurko  19:12
I think the best way to answer that, if I segue over to Hitchcock for a second, is to provide a comparison. Speaking of Hitchcock with the film vertigo …

Sarah Harrison  19:28
What I was thinking of the whole time I was running it, I was like Vertigo

Alex Csurko  19:33
For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the girl, but Kim Novak’s character in the film, in The Wheel Spins.

Carolyn Daughters  19:40
Eva St. Marie, maybe something like that.

Alex Csurko  19:43
Might be something like that. I believe and correct me. If I’m wrong, it’s been a while since I did Hitchcock, but in the book, the fact that she’s one in the same person, let’s. There is revealed right at the end. So you’ve got all of this is just insane. Is pining for his ex-love who’s died, and then all of a sudden, oh my god, surprise, as Hitchcock would say, No, it’s the same woman. And Hitchcock, in his interview with true for the famous Hitchcock true for book, he says, No, I wanted to make it so that the read, so that the audience knew that she is the same person, and that way, instead of surprise, you get suspense. And I think, and Hitchcock obviously loved suspense. They said that it was, it was the most superior form of anticipation, tension, mystery, everything. I think that’s exactly what Ethel Lina White’s doing here. She says, right, I’m gonna let the reader in on the secret, because that way the actions and the decisions and the thoughts of the characters that aren’t in the know, including Iris herself, because she slowly becomes convinced that she is crazy until she has a lucid dream and decides to but that’s over the end of The Wheel Spins.

Sarah Harrison  21:07
We’ll talk about that. That part’s awesome too.

Carolyn Daughters  21:10
We also spoil endings in this podcast.

Sarah Harrison  21:13
So folks, we can discuss the endings.

Alex Csurko  21:17
I can’t talk about Ethel Lina White without spoiling it. I spoil everything.

Sarah Harrison  21:21
Just don’t spoil the other books. Only spoil The Wheel Spins. I love how you split that up. It’s maybe I love it because that’s how I was thinking about it. And I feel like you get a little bit you get to have your cake and eat it too, that way, in a sense. So for the whole first part of the book, starting with the hike and meeting the stranger she can’t speak to, we get these reframings of Iris thoughts like she feels threatened, she feels scared, she thinks people aren’t to get her oh no, actually, they’re all helping her, and she’s safe and she’s protected. And so you keep getting these different vantage points. And so when we are on the train and she is wondering, I had that same feeling, and I specifically thought that this feels like I’m watching vertigo. Is Miss Freud, not even real. And we get all the way to that point, and then it flips, and she does let you in. So you do at least get the first third of The Wheel Spins, and it’s almost just purely psychological.

Alex Csurko  22:31
I will correct you on that family. Oh, correct you on that because I’ve got a book in the end, and I’m actually on the point where it does flip, and I’d say it’s just over halfway. Oh, halfway, very long time before we get that.

Sarah Harrison  22:45
Yes, before we’re introduced to Mrs. Froy, which was awesome. Yes, I love that insertion.

Carolyn Daughters  22:51
Their dog, Socrates, Sock.

Alex Csurko  23:02
I don’t know why she called him Socrates, and I think this is a nice time to introduce the fact that you might not know, but The Lady Vanishes. Everybody says, Oh, it’s just as good as Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, because it was written at roughly the same time. It’s another great train narrative of the Golden Age. You’ve also got Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train. But The Lady Vanishes, or The Wheel Spins, as it’s known in 1936, was originally a short story called Passengers. And it’s in the new book, by the way, but it was called Passengers, written in 1933, I believe, 32-33, and in that book, the dog’s still there, but it’s called Rex, something like that. It’s either Rex or begins with our can’t remember it, but the dog’s name’s different. Miss Froy is Miss Bird. The main character’s called Edna. And here’s a funny one, Max is called Carr.

Sarah Harrison  24:19
Oh, really?

Alex Csurko  24:22
All of the changes that she made when she made it into The Wheel Spins, really do fascinate me as to why. But the dog Socrates, I don’t know why she changed its Socrates, unless there’s some underlying Socrates, Greek tragedy. Her story is tragedy, if you want to go that basic on it.

Carolyn Daughters  24:40
She had a neighbor who had a dog named Socrates or something that we don’t know?

Alex Csurko  24:45
We know that she kept cats, but as to dogs we don’t know.

Carolyn Daughters  24:51
I’m always interested when there are initial drafts of a text and then plot changes. Of course, by the final for many authors, but also character names and histories and backstories and all of these different things. And I’m always curious about what prompts them. In some cases, I wonder if you’re making significant changes to a character, changing their name helps you see them differently.

Sarah Harrison  25:21
We did have one author tell us that, like he didn’t like his character anymore, and when he started the book over, he had to even throw out the name, because it was like somehow tied with this person in a story that was not the story he wanted to write. I don’t know.

Alex Csurko  25:38
The characters of Ethel Lina White nine times out I don’t think it applies with Iris, but nine times out of 10 the names have or at least in my world, the names have significance. For instance, I’ll just give you one example. It’s not The Wheel Spins, but in the first ever book, she wrote the wishbone. She has two characters, and one guy that talked about them said that the very unfortunate names marigold and hyacinth and I thought, maybe he’s got a point. But when you look at the Greek myths and look at hyacinthus and Marigold, if you take Nathaniel orthons interpretation of King Midas well, I’ll not go too into depth, because we’re not talking about that, but let’s just say interesting though, let’s just say that ayasyntha and Marigold are very specifically chosen names.

Sarah Harrison  26:36
Oh, that’s interesting. So she did actually reference things like Greek myths.

Alex Csurko  26:43
Essentially, my dissertation is 95% Greek myth. Oh, interesting.

Carolyn Daughters  26:53
The names that stand out for me the most in in The Wheel Spins are the Mrs. Flood-Porters, which I just love, and then the Todd-Hunters, which is this ostensibly honeymooning couple, very off on their own. They don’t really mix with the rest of the group. I would love to hear your insights, Alex, on class. They’re all of a leisured class, but the Todd Hunter scene may be elevated above that class, so one level up a ladder or something like that. But of course, the Todd-Hunters are not really the Todd Hunters. They are a couple having this little escape from their spouses. His last name is Brown. She’s Laura Parmiter. But I love that his last name is Brown, because the Todd Hunters. It just sounds so elegant and so dramatic. And then when we learn his Troy was saying yes.

Sarah Harrison  28:03
It’s Todd Hunter. They’re really married then, because if they were just making up a name, it’d be something stupid, like Brown.

Carolyn Daughters  28:11
Of course it is Brown. Can you talk a little bit about the cast of characters we’re working with? And, there are questions for me, of their class, so they’re all, I think, of a leisured class, where they can go on vacations for four or six weeks at a time, and they have this sort of flexibility and money to do this. And then another thing that occurred to me that I thought was so interesting is on Murder on the Orient Express Hercule Poirot is basically like brought onto the plane, onto the train, and put into this car. And it ends up affecting greatly the plot of the story, the fact that he is sharing this compartment, which he was not meant to do. He was not meant to be here. He was not meant to share this car. And Iris Carr has a very similar experience where she’s thrust onto this train and put into this car. And dramatically, of course, changes the course of events. Just so many interesting parallels. Murder on the Orient Express, of course, had more of diversity of class, whereas The Wheel Spins, is this leader leisure class? Maybe with gradations or, like, different levels. That’s a lot that I’ve just thrown at you.

Alex Csurko  29:44
Where do I begin? I think basically just going through the cast of characters is our can answer that Todd Hunters are a very interesting couple. Maybe it’s my love of intertextuality and references to other poems and players and books, but you’ll remember this from reading The Wheel Spins. But Mrs. Todd Hunter remembers her classes on the English book of the sorry, the Oxford book of verse, and remembers Robert Browning the statue and the bust. Well, Robert Browning, I am 100% convinced he was Ethel Lina White’s favorite poet, because she references him left, right, and center in every single book damn near so the statue and the bust is obviously a story of an extramarital affair. I won’t go into too much detail on that because that’s Browning and it’s a very long time. So to me, that couple is Ethel Lina White saying I’m going to talk about affair and show how it because I’m trying not to spoil the plots.

Carolyn Daughters  31:03
Well, for this one, you can spoil the plot for The Wheel Spins.

Alex Csurko  31:08
Well, I’ll try not to, if I can help it. Mrs. Todd Hunter has a lot of contemplations about being the female protagonist in the statue on the bust, and in fact, it’s her that ends up revealing that Miss Froy was actually on the train. So she’s a very major character in that sense. But when you find out that they’ve got an affair, it’s, again, these prejudices. As a reader, you’re thinking, these two are having an affair. How trustworthy are they? They don’t want to get involved. But so I’ll leave that to one side a sec. The flood quarters are typical spinsters. And again, spinsters are characters that Ethel includes in a lot of novels. Put out the light. You’ve got Anthea Viners, the main spinster, who’s the one, spoiler alert, that gets killed, face dogs the village. There’s the spinster that houses the poison pen, letter writer. So in some must watch, you’ve got go on. Let me get this right, lady. Oh no, I’ve had a mind blank on the name, but the woman who was in the Blue Room, she is also, well, she’s not a spinster, but she’s that sort of age, because she’ll notice that they’re all elderly spinsters.

Carolyn Daughters  32:31
That’s one question I have: how old is does one need to be to be a spinster?

Alex Csurko  32:37
Well, Ethel Lina White was a spinster, and her sister was as well, and they were spinsters since, well, forever. So I don’t think it can, should be anything.

Carolyn Daughters  32:47
What would an unsure but back in in 1936 say if, if you were 25 if you were 30, if you were 45 like, what? What age would somebody point to someone and say, this woman is a spinster.

Alex Csurko  33:03
I’d say any age. I’m not up on that. Not like 20.

Sarah Harrison  33:07
If you’re 20, you’re just unmarried yet. I like the character of what was your name, Edna Barnes in The Wheel Spins, who was considering that she used to travel in a crowd of spinsters, and now she had got this husband and a baby, and so she couldn’t have, actually, she could have been early 40s, maybe, but she couldn’t have been like 65 right? Maybe. So there was this middle-aged where you were moving into spinster hood, and she’d gotten snatched out of that.

Alex Csurko  33:46
I’d say, the way that it sounds, with the parents still living. I’d put her at 40s, 50s. Miss Froy. Yes, Miss Froy being about that. I have no idea Hitchcock, she’s about 90 odd.

Carolyn Daughters  34:06
Yes, I know. It’s so strange.

Alex Csurko  34:09
No wonder there’s no adult, no parents in that film, because they’d be ancient. Fact, there’s not in the other film either, the 2013 version. I don’t know why. See that’s that’s something I’ll talk about later, with the mission of the parents. The professor, who are Calder cotton charters in the film, apart from Gilbert.

Sarah Harrison  34:44
They just seemed like totally different characters there.

Alex Csurko  34:47
Mainly because they are. They were added in. They’re not in The Wheel Spins. I don’t know what Sidney gillia And Frank lander were thinking. That they spawned their own series the films. TV series, so, but no, but the professor and Max, typical British scholars, academic. And as you’ve pointed out, this well, the sexist.

Sarah Harrison  35:16
The professor’s killing me. Yes, I’m like, What is this character? Tell us about the professor’s character, where Max actually says he’s afraid of women. He seems to be very open about disliking women in his classes. He’s just really upset that one of them confessed her love for him and automatically, like, wrote her off as a hysterical idiot. Talk to me about what’s going on with his professor. Here. He’s a strange character.

Alex Csurko  35:45
The professor, in my eyes, again, everything that I interpret in one book, I see throughout all of her books, because I’m starting, as soon as I pick up a book, you can to me, it’s I can see when there’s a, what I call it, a White-ian trait, and that the professor is a typical male. Don’t mean that in general that. I know that’s offensive to a lot of males, if they’re listening, but he is a typical male for Ethel Lina White, if you will, look at every single book, there is a professor, maybe not called a professor, but there is a man who doesn’t like women or tolerates women, but don’t think the don’t think they’re worth the time of day, refuses to help them in their time of need. So the professor more so in The Wheel Spins, it’s a double edged sword, because on the one hand, he has his prejudices and all that. But on the one hand, he should believe iris and not just write her off as a hysterical woman, or he had. But on the other end, the evidence that he is receiving is to the contrary. There is absolutely no way on God’s earth that he should believe Iris. There is no evidence to support the fact that there is a misfire until the very end. But the professor’s character, the mere fact that he’s an academic, is important because he is, I think, overtly compared to the spare bearded doctor. In fact, I tabbed it, but I don’t think I’ll be able to find it. There’s so many tabs in my book. But there’s a point I think he’s actually, I don’t know if he’s talking to the professor or max. It’s one of the two. But the doctor says, If I was the Dr Smith of England, you trust me, yes, but because I’m foreign. Now, the irony again is, don’t trust the doctor because he is. But there’s a lot of Ethel Lina White.

Sarah Harrison  37:50
He was so good at, like, playing the bluff that was like, the doctor, yes, skill set was, bluff, bluff, bluff, bluff, bluff.

Alex Csurko  37:57
If you remember, I can’t remember the exact quote, but Iris says something along the lines of, I need your prestige. You’re an academic, the professor, you’re an academic, people will listen to you because you’re an academic. But likewise, people will listen to the doctor because he’s a doctor. So I don’t think, I don’t think his personal opinions are the major focus of the character. I think they’re there just as an Ethel Lina White sticking it to the man, to me, well, especially in this novel, every single character is stereotypical of their role rather than their persona. The Flood-Porters are typical British spinsters want to get home in the film, they want to get home to some flowers. What’s, what’s, what’s that all about? Right? I think the only ones you can sympathize with are the Reverend and his wife, Edna Barnes, because they’ve actually got a sick child. So Well, the mother instinct,

Sarah Harrison  39:01
I had problem with her. It was so I have young kids, right? And I know it is a thing like, when your kid, because it in the movie, in one of the movies, they have, like, a Spanish flu, and it’s potentially devastating. In The Wheel Spins, they had a cold. And you’re like, oh my goodness, you’re this overreacting. First time, elderly mom, the baby has a cold. And you’re like, quick, we’ve got to leave early. And I’ll spare my husband the terror of knowing the baby has a cold.

Carolyn Daughters  39:31
I will lie and say I don’t know anything about this. I guess we should go through this little plot development. But there’s no Miss Roy. There’s no English lady on, except Iris Carr in this compartment. But after Mrs. Barnes says yes, a woman sent tea for us. Then the next step. Up for the evildoers, and in the story are to put somebody in the place of Miss Froy and so frail Coomer and so Mrs. Barnes lies and says, Yes, that’s the woman who’s sent for the tea. Thank you for the tea. She wants to get back to her child. She doesn’t want to be stuck in Trieste with some sort of police incident or interviews or anything like that. She needs to get back home to her son, but she’s throwing Miss Roy to the wolves.

Sarah Harrison  40:34
She’s the one that solidly knew that that wasn’t. She’s really the only one that paid attention, I felt like, and made the decision on purpose, to elevate her baby’s cold above like, who cares about this missing woman and why? Obviously, did they put like once they put a decoy in there, and she knows it’s a decoy? To me, that would be so alarming. Yes, I thought maybe she was just in the dining car, and this girl’s being hysterical, but now they’ve actually inserted a decoy, and that’s the moment she chooses to.

Carolyn Daughters  41:11
In The Wheel Spins, with her son being sick, she chooses her son getting back to her son as expeditiously as possible, over telling the truth, and at what point? And maybe this is reader dependent, like, at what point do we say? That’s a tough call. But Mrs. Barnes, unlike the rest of the characters, I get it like I still balked at it. But maybe it is reader dependent? Maybe the idea of getting back to her son was so important some readers, maybe I’m outnumbered here, I don’t know. Might say, Okay, it’s not optimal, but I get it. What are your thoughts?

Sarah Harrison  41:57
Well, I already said I thought it was silly. I thought it was bad news, but Alex, you sounded like you had a little bit of sympathy with her.

Alex Csurko  42:06
I think something I have to add to my argument. I mean, the great thing about Ethel Lina White and this book especially, is that I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time. She can never, as I said, the characters are very complex, in a sense, they’ve got their own motives going off in the background. They’ve also got the situation on the train, as I said, Todd Hunter’s the one eventually to say, no, she is telling the truth. I did see her, I just didn’t want to say, oh, because we’re on her.

Sarah Harrison  42:37
If they didn’t actually say that in The Wheel Spins, and not in the book, I don’t they said it in the movie.

Alex Csurko  42:42
Oh, well, that’s me remembering that bit wrong.

Sarah Harrison  42:44
It gets confusing. There was no story growth. There was no growth art for anyone except Iris.

Carolyn Daughters  42:54
Iris is the only growth well. So then my question would be like, Well, okay, so he has a cold in The Wheel Spins, what if he did have the Spanish flu? Like, at what point do we excuse her decision to lie? What criteria are needed to say it’s understandable and excusable that she lied?

Sarah Harrison  43:19
That’s a wild question.

Carolyn Daughters  43:21
Well, it’s a broad one, but we’re saying, Oh well, she just her baby just had a cold. Well, back in the 30s an infant having a cold could have been potentially dangerous.

Alex Csurko  43:31.
Another factor, and this is, well, probably prevalent in the Lady Vanishes. And I do think this is, again, reader dependent. But there are other novels that show this of ethels that show this trait that she likes to I don’t like to use the word exaggerate, but I can’t think of a better word to take over that meaning. There’s another book that she wrote called The Elephant Never Forgets, and that is, my parents laugh at me when I say this. That is the only book that I would literally, I want. As I were reading it, I wanted to tear it into and throw it in a fire. It infuriated me for being so out there, unbelievable. And I think that’s exactly what’s happening with the bands, and they’re always got a cold. Let’s overreact. But I think that’s just a trait of ethels. So I think that’s why I can go, Well, yeah, because I know that she’s overreacting, because it’s on purpose.

Sarah Harrison  44:38
It’s a trait of new parents, it’s super well common to, like, call the pediatrician or go to the emergency room or just in anything. You’re like, Oh my goodness. And it’s like, I would say I was just telling Carolyn last night. It’s also promoted by the medical community. I was asking for about a wiggle that my son was doing once, and they sent me to the. Are and kept us for like 12 hours to test for seizures. It was like, nothing like that. But the way that new parents, especially, you see, like parents joke about the difference between their first child and their subsequent children, new parents, yes, realistically, do exaggerate anything that happens to their kids. So it is, it’s real, and it’s still frustrating that they’re doing this. One thing I wanted to say about if we can touch on one of the movie versions, Miss Barnes, I felt like the movies in a sense, and maybe we shouldn’t move into the movie conversation yet, because we’re at 45 minutes. But I do want to say this comment, I felt like in many ways, the movies were reader wish fulfillment, and that a lot of the stuff that I was thinking and wished would happen didn’t happen in the book, but did happen in the movies, and one of those was how Miss Barnes was elevating her baby above Miss Froy. But Miss Freud also had a parental situation of like elderly parents expecting her home and right, like they wanted their daughter too. Sure that conversation never happened in The Wheel Spins, but it did in the 2013 movie, Iris gave Miss Barnes a lecture about how she’s someone’s child too. That didn’t happen, but I had wanted it to happen.

Carolyn Daughters  46:33
In our next episode, I’d love to talk a bit about Ethel Lina White and this whole sense of premonition or foreboding, this ominous sense that ends every single chapter she’s genius at it, where it keeps the pages turning. I want to know, is this something she does in her other books? Is this something that she experimented with successfully, I would argue, and The Wheel Spins. I loved like that. You know, Stranger in a Strange Land. Idea of her in this country, not speaking the language, friendless and alone, and how that breaks her down. We have a lot to talk about, including, Oh, and another thing, that female hysteria, the neurosis, or whatever, like, what is happening with her. And I, I think that’s really interesting. We want to talk about the movies in the next episode.

Sarah Harrison  47:31
And we’re going to talk about everything.

Carolyn Daughters  47:33
Alex, more about you and what you’re studying in the magic circle. We have, I don’t know, 500-600 things to cover in the next episode if you’ll stick around with us to keep discussing The Wheel Spins.

Alex Csurko  47:47
I will, thanks.

Sarah Harrison 
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Carolyn Daughters
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Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.