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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The First Time He Died," Ethel Lina White intricately weaves a tale of suspense and psychological exploration that is emblematic of her mastery in the genre of mystery writing. Set against the backdrop of a deceptively serene English village, the narrative centers on a seemingly ordinary protagonist whose life is upended by a chilling murder. White employs an atmospheric literary style, blending vivid descriptions with taut dialogue to create an ever-present tension, while also delving into themes of identity, death, and the constructs of reality. This novel reflects the anxieties of the early 20th century'Äîa period characterized by rapid change and uncertainty'Äîmaking it both a gripping narrative and a social commentary of its time. Ethel Lina White, a renowned British author, skillfully harnessed her background in journalism and her keen insights into human behavior to craft compelling narratives. With a penchant for creating strong female protagonists, White often explored psychological dimensions and social critiques in her works. "The First Time He Died" serves as a testament to her literary prowess, showcasing her ability to unsettle and provoke reflection through plot twists and character dilemmas, possibly reflecting her own experiences as a woman in a patriarchal society. For readers who appreciate suspense, psychological intrigue, and a glimpse into the complexities of human nature, this novel is highly recommended. White'Äôs deft storytelling and richly drawn characters make "The First Time He Died" not only a thrilling experience but also a profound exploration of mortality and existential dread, ensuring its place as a classic in the mystery genre. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The First Time He Died
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers together thirty-two pieces by Ethel Lina White under the collective title The First Time He Died. It is a single-author collection that presents a sustained sequence of self-contained narratives rather than a single continuous novel, and it is designed to let readers encounter White’s work in concentrated form, one episode at a time. The table of contents preserves the original story titles as they stand, from All Men Are Mortal through The Second Time, and the collection’s purpose is to offer a compact survey of her fiction through multiple brief entries.
The texts assembled here are works of prose fiction, shaped as short stories and closely related narrative sketches. They move quickly into a situation, develop it with deliberate control, and close with an outcome that recalibrates what the reader thought was at stake. The recurring appearance of titles that suggest official records, domestic spaces, and public places—such as The Local Paper, Under the Clock, and A Bachelor Flat—signals how White often builds tension from ordinary settings and familiar routines. As a collection, the book highlights the author’s craft at the shorter length, where pacing and emphasis must be exact.
Although each entry is independent, the sequence coheres through shared preoccupations. Many titles gesture toward mortality, bereavement, and the social machinery that surrounds death, as in Funeral Honours, Corpse-Candles, and Act of God, while others suggest investigation, risk, and uncertainty, as in A Suspicious Case and Suspense. White’s characteristic method is to treat peril not as spectacle but as a pressure that distorts the everyday: neighbors, travel, paperwork, and casual acquaintance become conduits for dread. The result is a set of stories linked by atmosphere and moral temperature rather than by recurring characters.
White’s style is marked by clarity, economy, and a steady accumulation of detail that makes a shift in tone feel earned rather than forced. Her scenes tend to rely on what can be observed—habits, objects, small social exchanges—and then reveal how quickly those surfaces can become unstable. This collection emphasizes that signature restraint: the narratives are alert to irony, but they do not depend on flourish, and they aim for clean lines of cause and consequence. The effect is suspense that arises from the logic of the situation and the vulnerabilities of people within it.
Across the contents, the story world is often defined by thresholds and transitions: fences, hiding-places, railway carriages, visits, and searches appear as motifs of crossing and exposure. Such settings allow White to explore the tension between privacy and scrutiny, safety and threat, the self and the public account. Even when a title implies the extraordinary, the writing habitually returns to the concrete and the plausible, keeping the reader close to the moment-by-moment decisions that create danger or avert it. The collection’s structure invites comparison between different variations of the same anxieties.
Read together, these pieces show how White repeatedly tests the reliability of perception, the comfort of routine, and the promises of familiar narratives. A photograph, a souvenir, or a newspaper can become a catalyst, suggesting how meaning is assigned and misassigned in the wake of shock. The stories also register how social roles—guest and host, spouse and stranger, witness and suspect—can shift under stress, and how swiftly ordinary courtesy can turn into concealment or coercion. Without requiring a continuous plot, the book sustains a coherent imaginative territory.
The ongoing significance of White’s fiction lies in its disciplined approach to suspense and its attentiveness to the everyday as a site of moral and psychological pressure. This collection offers an accessible way to see the range of situations she could animate while maintaining a consistent intensity and a distinctive coolness of tone. Readers who come for mystery and unease will find them, but they will also find a writer interested in how people explain events to themselves and to others, and how those explanations can fail. Taken as a whole, the volume presents a concentrated portrait of a durable narrative sensibility.
Historical Context
Ethel Lina White wrote within Britain’s interwar “Golden Age” of detective and suspense fiction, a period shaped by the First World War’s mass bereavement (1914–1918) and the search for order afterward. The popularity of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and crime magazines created a receptive market for tightly plotted stories in which ordinary settings conceal danger. White’s collection draws on the era’s appetite for rational explanation, yet it repeatedly tests the limits of certainty through accidents, mistaken identities, and everyday objects turned ominous, reflecting a society negotiating trauma, modernity, and lingering Victorian moral codes.
The 1920s and 1930s brought rapid urban and suburban change: expanded rail travel, commuters, boarding houses, and the “anonymous crowd” of cities. These conditions fostered crimes of opportunity and anxieties about strangers, themes that underlie stories involving railway-carriages, visitors, local papers, and untraceable addresses. The interwar period also saw increasing mobility for women and shifting domestic expectations, complicated by economic pressures. White’s perspective—often attentive to household routines, rented rooms, and precarious respectability—mirrors contemporary fears that mobility and anonymity could dissolve traditional safeguards and reputations.
Mass communication transformed how Britons encountered crime. Newspapers, popular weeklies, and wireless broadcasting (the BBC founded 1922) amplified sensational cases and standardized the language of “mystery” and “suspense.” Stories that hinge on photographs, local papers, souvenirs, or public rumor reflect a world where evidence is mediated and reputations can be remade overnight. The interwar press also cultivated celebrity culture and satirical political commentary, influencing comic intrusions of public figures and the tone of some narratives. White’s contemporary reception benefited from readers trained by headlines to anticipate twists and interpret clues.
Forensic modernity and policing reforms also shaped the genre’s plausibility. The Metropolitan Police’s Criminal Investigation Department matured in the early twentieth century; fingerprint evidence was adopted in Britain from 1901, and forensic pathology gained status through institutional growth and high-profile trials. Such developments encouraged writers to stage conflicts between common-sense inference and technical proof. White’s fiction often toys with official procedure versus private insight, highlighting both confidence in scientific detection and distrust of its limits. The result is suspense rooted not only in who committed an act, but in whether institutions can reliably name and contain guilt.
Economic instability sharpened interwar tension. The General Strike of 1926, the Great Depression after 1929, and persistent unemployment produced insecurity that seeped into popular fiction as plots about money, insurance, inheritance, and desperation. White’s stories repeatedly treat domestic spaces—flats, rented rooms, and modest homes—as pressure cookers where financial strain and class resentment distort relationships. The gap between genteel appearances and precarious reality was widely recognized by contemporary readers. This backdrop encouraged narratives in which small losses escalate into life-and-death stakes, and where moral compromise seems less like aberration than adaptation.
Cultural fascination with death and the supernatural persisted after the war, mixing older folklore with modern psychology. Spiritualism surged in the 1920s, while psychical research and popular accounts of omens circulated widely; at the same time, Freudian ideas entered public discourse, reframing fear and desire as hidden drives. White uses this climate to balance rational crime with eerie atmosphere—corpse-lights, premonitions, and uncanny coincidences—without abandoning narrative logic. The result resonates with an era that both mourned on an unprecedented scale and sought consolations or explanations beyond orthodox faith and official fact.
Gender politics and domestic ideology changed quickly between the wars. British women gained the parliamentary vote on the same terms as men in 1928, while employment patterns and consumer culture expanded women’s public presence. Yet the “ideal” home remained a moral battleground, and marriage, second marriages, and sexual respectability carried legal and social consequences. White’s work reflects this tension: female protagonists often navigate threat inside supposedly safe spaces and confront coercion masked as propriety. Contemporary audiences, attuned to debates over autonomy and vulnerability, found such plots credible and unsettling precisely because they unfolded within familiar domestic scripts.
By the late 1930s, European instability and the approach of the Second World War revived fears of sudden catastrophe and random loss. British civil defense planning, air-raid anxieties, and a broader sense of living under looming “acts of God” strengthened narratives about chance, fate, and fragile normality. White’s collection, though grounded in everyday locales, channels this atmosphere through abrupt reversals and the persistent question of how easily life can be disrupted. Readers encountering these stories near the end of the interwar era would have recognized their underlying unease as part of a wider historical mood of precarious peace.
Synopsis (Selection)
All Men Are Mortal
A seemingly ordinary situation turns into a tight study of how quickly certainty erodes when death, chance, and motive blur together. The tone is cool and observant, using everyday details to probe vulnerability and the private calculations people make under pressure.
The story foregrounds White’s signature interest in misdirection—how plausible explanations compete until one choice has consequences. Themes of mortality, self-preservation, and the gap between what’s known and what’s assumed drive the suspense.
The Miracle
A reported “miracle” disrupts a closed community and tests how faith, rumor, and self-interest shape what people believe they witnessed. The mood balances wonder with unease, keeping attention on social reaction as much as on the event itself.
White treats the extraordinary as a catalyst for ordinary motives—status, guilt, and opportunism—rather than as an answer in itself. The thematic focus is on credulity versus evidence and how narratives harden into “truth.”
Beginner's Luck
A novice’s apparent good fortune invites envy and suspicion, exposing how quickly luck can look like design when stakes rise. The tone is brisk and ironic, emphasizing the hazards of early confidence.
The plot leans on White’s recurring motif of accidents that may not be accidental, and the psychological aftershocks they produce. Themes include risk-taking, social perception, and the thin line between advantage and danger.
The First Fence
A small boundary—literal or figurative—becomes the trigger for escalating tension, as people defend territory, pride, or secrets. The story’s controlled pacing turns a minor dispute into a larger moral test.
White focuses on how rules and property can mask deeper resentments and fears. Motifs of limits, trespass, and disproportionate retaliation sharpen the suspense without requiring overt spectacle.
Corpse-Candles
A folk belief about ominous lights frames a mystery in which superstition competes with practical explanations. The tone is atmospheric and chilly, using landscape and local lore to heighten dread.
White blends the uncanny with clear-eyed psychology, showing how fear can steer interpretation and behavior. Themes include communal suggestion, the need to assign meaning, and the danger of treating signs as proof.
The Visitor
A guest’s arrival unsettles the household, as politeness becomes a stage for concealed scrutiny and shifting power. The story is taut and intimate, driven by small observations and tightening discomfort.
White highlights the vulnerability of domestic spaces to intrusion—physical, emotional, or reputational. Themes center on trust, performance, and how quickly normal routines can become threatening.
Cave-Woman
A woman pushed to the margins finds unexpected leverage, forcing others to reassess their assumptions about civility and control. The tone mixes sharp social observation with a faintly feral edge, stressing instinct beneath manners.
White’s interest in constrained roles and sudden reversals comes to the fore, with identity treated as both mask and weapon. Themes include gendered expectations, survival strategies, and the cost of underestimating someone.
The Sword of Damocles
A character lives under a looming threat—real, implied, or misread—while everyday decisions become charged with consequence. The story is suspenseful in a quiet way, where anticipation does most of the work.
White emphasizes psychological pressure and the distortion of judgment under prolonged fear. Themes include inevitability, moral compromise, and the exhausting arithmetic of avoiding disaster.
Enter Chester Beaverbrook / Charge—Chester—Charge
These linked Chester Beaverbrook tales use a recurring figure to stitch together comic menace and brisk, plot-forward surprises. The tone is lighter and more performative than surrounding pieces, but the stakes remain sharp.
Across the pair, White plays with persona, bravado, and the gap between public role and private intent. Motifs of showmanship, opportunism, and sudden reversals underline her taste for controlled misdirection.
Funeral Honours
A death and its rituals become the setting for competing stories about the deceased and the living who benefit from them. The tone is restrained and pointed, treating ceremony as both comfort and camouflage.
White uses the social choreography of mourning to explore hypocrisy, loyalty, and opportunism. Themes include reputation, inheritance of guilt or advantage, and how grief can be weaponized without open conflict.
A Souvenir
An object kept as a memento turns into a focal point for memory, attachment, and suspicion. The tone is intimate and slightly claustrophobic, as meaning accumulates around something small.
White’s motif of incriminating or destabilizing things—tokens, papers, photographs—appears here in concentrated form. Themes include nostalgia’s distortions, ownership, and the quiet power of evidence.
Oh, the Mistletoe-Bough
A festive setting becomes unnervingly unstable as tradition collides with concealed tension and risk. The tone contrasts seasonal warmth with a creeping sense of hazard, using social expectation as pressure.
White exploits the irony of celebration as cover for fear, secrets, or misjudgment. Themes include performance, constrained choice, and how familiar rituals can make danger easier to miss.
The End of the Search
A pursuit for clarity—of a person, a truth, or a missing piece—reaches a stopping point that reframes what the search meant. The story is reflective yet tense, more concerned with consequences than spectacle.
White spotlights the costs of obsession and the limits of knowing, a recurring thread across her suspense. Themes include closure versus acceptance and the moral ambiguity of “finding out.”
The Railway-Carriage
A confined journey forces strangers into proximity, where fleeting impressions and small cues become high-stakes interpretations. The tone is compressed and watchful, using the carriage as a pressure chamber.
White’s signature economy shines: a few gestures and details drive a sense of threat without overt action. Themes include anonymity, social masking, and how quickly narratives form in transit.
The Photograph
A picture captures more than intended, setting off a chain of anxiety about what can be seen, proven, or misread. The tone is crisp and modern, anchored in the unsettling permanence of an image.
White treats visual “evidence” as ambiguous and socially volatile, a motif she returns to through objects and documents. Themes include identity, exposure, and the gap between appearance and intent.
The Local Paper
A small-town publication becomes a conduit for gossip, leverage, and unintended consequences as private lives become public material. The tone is dryly observant, emphasizing the power of minor institutions.
White explores how information spreads and hardens, and how fear of publicity can drive risky decisions. Themes include reputation, communal judgment, and the violence that can hide in polite curiosity.
Salvage Operations
Recovery—of property, status, or a compromised plan—turns into a tense exercise in improvisation and concealment. The tone is practical and suspenseful, focused on logistics that reveal character.
White’s interest in aftershocks is central here: what matters is not only what happened, but how people try to manage its traces. Themes include damage control, complicity, and the fragile boundary between repair and cover-up.
A Suspicious Case
An ambiguous situation invites an investigator’s mindset from ordinary people, and suspicion spreads faster than certainty. The tone is methodical but uneasy, privileging inference over confession.
White highlights how suspicion can be both rational and corrosive, reshaping relationships even without proof. Themes include judgment, bias, and the danger of treating possibility as verdict.
Suspense
The story foregrounds tension itself, building dread through delayed understanding and carefully rationed information. The tone is spare and controlled, turning anticipation into the central event.
White showcases her stylistic signature: tight pacing, domestic realism, and a twist of psychological pressure rather than melodrama. Themes include uncertainty, self-deception, and how fear edits perception.
Act of God
An event framed as natural or inevitable becomes morally complicated when human choices and accountability surface around it. The tone is sober and exacting, questioning easy labels.
White uses the phrase’s implication—no one to blame—to examine how responsibility can be displaced or reclaimed. Themes include causality, excuse-making, and the ethics of calling misfortune “fate.”
No Address
A missing point of contact—literal or social—creates a vacuum where intention is hard to verify and danger is hard to locate. The tone is pared-down and anxious, built around absence rather than action.
White turns the lack of traceability into a suspense engine, echoing her recurring interest in evidence and its limits. Themes include anonymity, miscommunication, and the vulnerability of being unfindable—or unable to find.
Under the Clock
A public meeting point becomes a stage for chance encounters, timing, and the peril of being seen in the wrong place. The tone is brisk and observational, with urban anonymity adding edge.
White treats timekeeping and coincidence as tools that can tighten a plot without overt villains. Themes include surveillance by strangers, social interpretation, and how routine spaces can turn threatening.
In Search of Realism
A pursuit of “realism” in art, story, or self-presentation exposes the compromises people make to appear truthful. The tone is wry and analytical, with a self-aware look at narrative and authenticity.
White’s work often hinges on what seems plausible; here she makes that concern explicit. Themes include performance, credibility, and the uneasy overlap between accurate detail and deceptive story.
The Second Wife
A remarriage rearranges loyalties and expectations, as the newcomer navigates a web of prior attachments and quiet comparisons. The tone is intimate and tense, attentive to social nuance and domestic power.
White emphasizes how households store history and how newcomers inherit conflicts they didn’t create. Themes include jealousy, legitimacy, and the subtle ways affection and resentment can become dangerous.
Dark Strands
Interwoven “strands” of connection—family, secrets, cause and effect—tighten into a pattern that is felt before it is fully understood. The tone is moody and insinuating, with menace emerging from linkage.
White’s style here leans into cumulative dread rather than single shocks, connecting small choices to larger risk. Themes include entanglement, hidden influence, and the difficulty of cutting oneself free.
The Lady in the Case
A contained “case” holds a problem—person, object, or secret—that forces a reckoning over what is protected and what is exposed. The tone is precise and slightly theatrical, balancing concealment with reveal.
White revisits her recurring device of enclosed spaces and portable evidence. Themes include confinement, possession, and the peril of turning a person into an item within someone else’s story.
Into the Blue
A move toward the unknown—escape, flight, or a leap of faith—carries both liberation and threat as certainty falls away. The tone is airy on the surface but edged with unease.
White contrasts freedom with vulnerability, a pattern across her suspense where openness can be as dangerous as confinement. Themes include risk, reinvention, and the cost of leaving safeguards behind.
A Bachelor Flat
A private urban space reveals its occupant through what it hides as much as what it displays, and a visitor’s perspective sharpens the unease. The tone is modern and clipped, with domestic detail turned suspicious.
White treats rooms as psychological maps, returning to her motif of interiors that betray their owners. Themes include secrecy, social isolation, and the hazards of intimacy without trust.
The Hiding-Place
A place meant to conceal becomes a source of escalating tension as safety and trap start to look alike. The tone is close and breathless, emphasizing constraint and timing.
White excels at turning practical problems—where to hide, what can be seen—into moral and psychological strain. Themes include concealment, complicity, and the instability of refuge.
Nails
Small, hard details—literal nails or what they suggest—anchor a story where minor facts carry outsized weight. The tone is sharp and tactile, with menace built from the ordinary.
White’s technique of making everyday objects feel evidentiary and fateful is distilled here. Themes include fixation, inevitability, and how the smallest components can hold a whole structure together.
The First Time He Died / The Second Time
These paired capstone pieces circle the idea of “dying” as event and as narrative—how a life can appear to end, restart, or be rewritten by perception and record. The tone is darker and more formally conscious, tightening White’s suspense methods into a final, resonant shape.
Together they highlight a notable late-collection shift toward reflexive questions about identity, proof, and the stories people accept as final. Recurring motifs—misdirection, documents and objects as triggers, and domestic spaces turned hazardous—reappear in concentrated form.
The First Time He Died
I. — ALL MEN ARE MORTAL
NEARLY every one in the small town of Starminster was sorry to hear of Charlie Baxter's death. He was popular with women, while men invariably called him a "decent little chap"—a curious inaccuracy, since he was well over medium height.
A gentle unassuming nature, he stole out of life as unobtrusively as he left a party—when he nodded farewell to his host and slipped away, without any one knowing that he had gone. At the time flu was epidemic. One day, some one mentioned casually that he was ill. The next bit of news was a thunderclap in the billiard-room at the Grapes.
"Poor Baxter's passed out."
There was a chorus of "Poor chap," for Charlie's slate was clean. He paid his bills, subscribed modestly to local charities, and listened to golf stories. Did the usual things, while his game was always a trifle below the standard of his opponent; the drinks were inevitably on him, but he was a cheerful loser.
No one was really surprised, therefore, to hear that Death had found him a bit below his form, and had taken advantage of the fact.
"When did he die?" asked some one.
"Late last night," replied the herald.
"Flu, I suppose?"
"Yes. Sudden collapse. Heart was weak, I'm told."
"No, it wasn't," announced Acorn, the Insurance agent.
He chalked his cue and looked around him, with no real hope, for some one whom he could beat at snooker. He was the first person to miss Charlie Baxter.
"Damn mistake if they had that old fool Dubarry to attend him," he said savagely. "Another doctor might have pulled him through."
"Mrs. Baxter swears by him," remarked a masculine gossip.
"She would."
The company grunted assent. It was an established fact that Dr. Dubarry had the brains of a stewed mushroom, and allowed nothing to interfere with his personal pleasure; but it had to be admitted in his favour that he had almost entirely ceased to practise, and only took on a case after personal persuasion.
When the matrons of the town heard of Charlie Baxter's death they added a rider to the verdict of medical inefficiency. They hinted that Vera Baxter might have been too casual in her treatment of the patient. Heads were shaken and tongues wagged.
"He always waited on her. It would be a change for her to wait on him. A pity they did not have a trained nurse."
"But Dr. Dubarry said she was wonderful," observed a more charitable tongue.
"He would. She's a pretty woman."
Unlike her husband, Vera Baxter was not very popular in the town. She was a cheery, capable little person, with an anti-litter mind; but she could not play hockey, and they could never be certain that she had gone to the right school.
In appearance, she was a slim, pretty blonde—smart and decorative—who looked too young to be married, until it was noticed that her shrewd blue eyes had grown up before the rest of her.
What the town chiefly resented was the third occupant of Jasmine Cottage—Puggie Williams. He had been a fixture there for several months and was a man of mystery. He wore old well-cut clothes with distinction and his voice betrayed breeding; but he had the red-veined mashed face of a hard drinker, and when he remembered to forget his origin, his manners were appalling.
It was evident, however, that he had begun life in a different social sphere from that of his friends, and had probably met them, when he was sliding down the ladder and they were climbing up, so had clung round their necks, as ballast.
He appeared to be on excellent terms with Charlie and a real friendship seemed to exist between the three. Vera ordered him about as much as she dominated her gentle husband, for she was the type who expected men to be doormats. All the same, the town could not accept Puggie, in connection with Vera, because of his sex.
The news of the tragedy swept through Starminster like a prairie fire. It was a day of wretched weather. There had been a heavy snowfall in the night, so that, in the morning, every roof was white-capped and the church steeple looked like a sugar-loaf.
Now, however, it had begun to melt. Slush covered the pavements and lay in the gutter, while the country roads were churned by traffic to the consistency of brown fudge. The hills were iced silhouettes against the grey sky, and the streets appeared dark and miserable. People's faces—pinched with cold—seemed actually dirty, so that any one with an artificial complexion was a public benefactor. It was chill and gloomy, and no time to think of death.
Yet it was constantly in the thoughts of many a woman. Charlie's last public appearance had been at a Primrose Dance, when there had been a man-famine. Too retiring to invite the attractive girls and women, he had danced exclusively with wallflowers.
