Fear Stalks The Village - Ethel Lina White

I read this book back in May when I picked it up off the top of the nearest pile to be read (there are always piles to be read) and absolutely loved it. It's a slightly tongue-in-cheek examination of what is on the surface a picture-perfect village full of entirely admirable and apparently happily married gentry.

The architecture is a pleasing mix of Tudor, Queen Anne, and Georgian, there's no train line to bring day trippers, all of the old families have adequate private incomes. And yet can anything really be so perfect? No, it cannot; a poison pen letter is proof that something is rotten underneath that wholesome surface. There are rumours which cause a social distancing, more letters bring more fear as neighbours start to distrust each other, and it becomes clear everyone has secrets of their own to guard.

There are clear hints about the overall culprit early on in the book along with some splendid red herrings, but the point is to examine how a hint of blackmail and the pursuit of social power corrupts good people, and how the appearance of goodness matters more than the real thing for many. It's clever, amusing, and not very murdery and I highly recommend it for a lazy afternoon. 

It was my first and most obvious choice for reprint of the year too, not so much because I found the plot or the handling of it especially original, I’d say both are competent rather than brilliant, but because Ethel Lina White is masterly at setting up an atmosphere and getting her characters right, and more than anything she really understands fear and how it operates in this middle class domestic setting.

I wonder if this book also resonates with me so much is also because whilst men are caught up and become victims in this scenario, it’s really a book about the social power and standing of women in a world where they don’t have much other influence. The men, we feel, might forgive each other’s transgressions, the women will not even as they delight in the downfall of their peers. And more than that – even the social power these women have is mostly by permission of their menfolk as we see when the squire takes a dislike to a married woman because he flirted with her. The effects of his disapproval are economic as well as social.

If you have not read Ethal Lina White yet, get her in for the Christmas holiday, you will not regret it. Despite the summer setting this is an excellent winter read – that atmosphere of suspicion behind drawn curtains is just the thing for a dark winters night.