FEAR STALKS THE VILLAGE

An anonymous correspondent inundates an English village with poison pen letters in this 1932 mystery.

Ironically, the first recipient is Miss Decima Asprey, the queen of Spout Manor, whose reputation for kindness and civility is unimpeachable. Even so, the accusations, which she duly reports to the rector, Rev. Simon Blake, leave her neighbors uneasy when they learn about them, as they quickly do. The stakes rise when Julia Corner, a novelist who’s president of the local Temperance Society, is found dead of an overdose of veronal soon after receiving a second letter. The verdict of the coroner’s court is death from misadventure, but that doesn’t alleviate the palpable apprehensions of the villagers, who fear that their slightest infractions will be aired to the public—a fear that’s soon justified when another letter that hits uncomfortably close to the mark provokes two suicides. Vivian Sheriff, daughter of the local squire, is especially worried that warped reports about her earlier romance with a soldier killed in the Great War will dash all hopes of her engagement to Major Blair. Since no one is willing to report anything to the police, the rector, noting that their shared home is such a peaceful place that “no one leaves the village, except to die,” calls on his friend Ignatius Brown, who’s had some luck with investigations in the past, and it’s Brown who pierces the surprisingly dense layers of deception to identify the culprit.

Even readers who find White’s decorous tale less than terrifying will be treated to a well-nigh unguessable solution.