The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White

I seem to be on a massive crime/detective fiction splurge recently, and I'm not sure how it happened. This is the book that Hitchcock's famous The Lady Vanishes and the recent BBC production of the same name are based on, I've seen The Lady Vanishes ages ago, and though I remember liking it, I can't remember anything about it. The novel is definitely fast and exciting reading, it definitely held my attention, but I'm not sure I like the writing style, which can be sloppy (hard to understand who's talking due to tangled pronouns) and melodramatic by turns. But the plot is a densely woven tissue of coincidences and mind-games, which I really liked. All the English people on a train travelling back to England from somewhere in the southeast of Europe are in a sort of 'conspiracy of complacency' about the disappearance of a woman, because it happens to be inconvenient for everyone for different reasons to risk delay to search for her, except a young, bored upper-class Iris Carr, who is somewhat rude, but overall rather likeable. I have an absolutely hate travelling, and I think that it tends to bring out weird sides of people, so I really liked how the unstable atmosphere of the journey was worked into the plot, with continual jolting, impatience, annoyance, even fear. I wound up rather admiring Iris, I have to say that if I wasn't sure where someone had gone on my train, I would not interfere if it meant having to spend an extra second in route. It's hard to be sure what Iris's motives for her persistence in trying to find the vanished Miss Froy are, I don't know if it really was any moral superiority to others, or just not having anything to get back to at home, I'm not sure she would have acted the same way if there was something urgent waiting for her in London. It's a frightening study in how deadly people's indifference can be, and it's definitely a very exciting story, and full of fun 1930s slang and interesting details of the time.