A rip-roaringly good yarn of suspense and tension on a train journey.
The movie adaptation diverges from the book in a number of ways. Some I think are improvements, some maybe not. I actually prefer the book's motive for the villains. But I prefer the characters in the movie. In the movie, some people are combined and some are replaced, and it just results in a tighter storyline and also some welcome comedic relief.
The tension in this book is really well done, especially because Miss Carr is truly, truly, truly on her own in this dilemma, to a degree beyond what the movie depicts. The book also gives her more of a back story to explain how it is that she's gotten so cut off from the support of other people.

Ultimately I thought it was a top-notch story from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and it completely holds its own against the more well-known authors from the 20's and 30's. ( )

White, Ethel Lina. The Lady Vanishes [Original title The Wheel Spins]. 1936. Murder Room, [2001].
I recently watched the first two movie versions of The Lady Vanishes, and so I decided to take a peek at the source material. When Ethel Lina White, then a strong competitor for Agatha Christie, wrote this novel, the Nazi’s were not the villains. The worry was communist radical revolution in Europe, but White places them well in the background. She is interested in the psychology of memory, as our heroine spends most of the story in a semi-drugged, perhaps concussed, condition, trying to get others to believe her story about a woman vanishing off a moving train and beginning to doubt her own sanity. The plot focuses on the numerous motives people have for either not believing her or lying about what they saw. If Agatha Christie’s novels sometimes seem dated, White seems antediluvian. Her dialogue is unimpressive, and I notice that neither Hitchcock nor Anthony Page had much respect for it. In both movie versions, the story is changed from a murder story to an espionage tale and updated to fit the prewar setting. Hitchcock in 1938 seems most interested in playing with the new sound technology and having fun shooting in the tight confines of the train—elements he would exploit for the rest of his career. The 1979 Page remake with Elliott Gould and Cybill Shepherd is more interested in recreating a nostalgic homage to Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. I have not seen the 2013 Masterpiece Mystery version with Tuppence Middleton, which reviews suggest is truer to the novel than either of the first two films. ( )

This little known 1930s novel was the inspiration for the famous Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes and its two remakes. I was inspired to seek it out and read it after watching the 2013 TV movie version last week (actually closer in some ways to the original novel than was the Hitchcock film). The story is fairly well known: young socialite Iris Carr is travelling by train across Europe and befriends a middle aged spinster, Miss Froy. When she wakes up, Miss Froy has disappeared and the other passengers deny she ever existed. Iris's desperate attempts to establish the truth of what she remembers and what has happened to Miss Froy are quite gripping to read, even knowing the course of events and eventual outcome. The novel contains more backstory about Miss Froy and many of the other characters than do any of the screen versions, though I felt this broke the narrative tension a bit too much. A good read. ( )

This was really fun! Very much like reading a Hitchcock movie. ( )

Iris Carr is traveling home from a vacation alone when she meets Miss Froy, an English governess, on the train. When Iris wakes from a nap, Miss Froy is gone and doesn't return. Though Iris searches for her, she can't be found. Even worse, the other passengers deny ever seeing her. Add in two rather sinister passengers and it does seem something untoward has occurred. The book's slow pace aggravated me but at the same time added to the tension. ( )