Ethel Lina White's novel (Simon and Schuster,1936) is a mediocre mystery novel that would likely be forgotten today if it had not been made into the movie The Lady Vanishes (1938), directed by Alfred Hitchcock with a screenplay by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. Hitchcock's film is not only suspenseful and intriguing, it is also quite funny and subtly political, with Englishmen concerned only about cricket scores when Europe is on the brink of war. White's plot and characters are flimsy even by British mystery standards, while Hitchcock's characters are fleshed out in considerable detail, each one with a plausible reason why they can't reveal that they had seen Miss Froy, the lady who vanished.
I will give White credit for intelligence in her writing, even if it is devoid of humor and character. At one point the following conversation is overheard:
"For instance, how would you describe that dark woman with the artificial lashes?"
"Attractive."
"Hum. I should call her meretricious and so would any average man of the world."
These days what man, average or not, would use the word meretricious? It is a useful word that I use (some might say overuse, though I would respond that that is because of the nature of today's world) but, believe it or not, I have yet to encounter anyone who knows and appreciates its meaning. It comes from a Latin word and I think that the limited vocabulary of today's speech and books comes from a lack of knowledge of Latin and Greek (among other causes, of course), knowledge once assumed to be a part of an education. I am not a big admirer of Ethel Lina White or Dorothy Sayers (who wrote around the same time) but I am of P.G. Wodehouse: they all chose the right word and trusted that their readers would understand it.
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