The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

By Marie Belloc Lowndes and Nick Rennison

The Buntings are an elderly London couple who have fallen on hard times. They take in a lodger with the strange name of Mr. Sleuth, who pays handsomely for their shabby rooms. He seems to be a perfect gentleman but none the less they begin to suspect that he may be the Jack-the-Ripper-like serial killer known in the press as ‘The Avenger’.

As the number of murders in the city begins to mount, and Mr. Bunting’s teenage daughter from an earlier marriage comes to stay, the couple must decide what to do about the man in their upstairs rooms...

An early example of a psychological suspense story and a brilliant evocation of the fog-bound and gaslit streets of late Victorian London, The Lodger is still a wonderfully compelling thriller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crime & Mystery Club
• Release date: Mar 25, 2020
• ISBN: 0857300091

Book preview

THE LODGER

The Buntings are an elderly London couple who have fallen on hard times. They take in a lodger with the strange name of Mr. Sleuth, who pays handsomely for their shabby rooms. He seems to be a perfect gentleman but none the less they begin to suspect that he may be the Jack-the-Ripper-like serial killer known in the press as ‘The Avenger’. As the number of murders in the city begins to mount, and Mr. Bunting’s teenage daughter from an earlier marriage comes to stay, the couple must decide what to do about the man in their upstairs rooms. An early example of a psychological suspense story and a brilliant evocation of the fog-bound and gaslit streets of late Victorian London, The Lodger is still a wonderfully compelling thriller.

About the Author

Marie Adelaide Lowndes, née Belloc (August 5, 1868 – November 14, 1947), was a prolific English novelist. Active from 1904 until her death, she had a literary reputation for combining exciting incident with psychological interest. Her most famous novel, The Lodger (1913), based on the Jack the Ripper murders, has been adapted for the screen five different times; the first movie version was Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). Another novel of hers, Letty Lynton (1931), was the basis for the 1932 motion picture of the same name starring Joan Crawford. Born in Marylebone, London and raised in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, Mrs Belloc Lowndes was the only daughter of French barrister Louis Belloc and English feminist Bessie Parkes. Her brother was Hilaire Belloc. Her paternal grandfather was the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc and her maternal great-grandfather was Joseph Priestley. In 1896 she married Frederic Sawrey Lowndes. Her first novel, The Heart of Penelope, was published in 1904. From then on novels, reminiscences and plays came from her quill at the rate of one per year until 1946. In the novel, I, too, Have Lived in Arcadia, published in 1942, Mrs Belloc Lowndes told the story of her mother’s life, compiled largely from old family letters and her own memories of her early life in France. Her most famous novel is The Lodger, published in 1913. Based on the Jack the Ripper murders, it is about a London family who suspects that their upstairs lodger is a mysterious killer known as ‘The Avenger’. The novel was the basis for five movie adaptations. The first was the silent film version The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927, followed by Maurice Elvey’s in 1932, John Brahm’s in 1944, Man in the Attic in 1953, and David Ondaatje’s in 2009. She died November 14, 1947 at the home of her elder daughter, Countess Iddesleigh (wife of the third Earl) in Eversley Cross, Hampshire. She was interred in France, in La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Versailles, where she spent her youth.

GASLIGHT CRIME – A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Nick Rennison

When fans of crime novels talk of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, they are usually referring to the 1920s and the 1930s – the era of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham. Yet there was an earlier and arguably greater Golden Age – the period between 1887, the year in which Sherlock Holmes first appeared, and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This was the Age of Gaslight Crime. It was during these years that crime fiction emerged as a full-fledged genre of literature. This was the time when dozens of weekly and monthly magazines regularly featured crime stories. It was when some of the major publishers of the day began to publish detective novels in large numbers for the first time. It was when Sherlock Holmes grew and grew in popularity until he was established as the iconic figure in British culture he has remained to the present day.

The era had other genre bestsellers in addition to Conan Doyle’s novels and collections of short stories about his great detective. Some even sold more copies than the works of the maestro. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume, for instance, was first published in 1886 in Melbourne, Australia, the city in which the story takes place. The following year – the same year in which Sherlock Holmes took his first bow in A Study in Scarlet – the novel appeared in an edition published in London. It went on to sell half a million copies worldwide, far outstripping early sales of Conan Doyle’s book. Hume published more than a hundred other novels, not all of them crime fiction, in a career that lasted until 1932 but none had the startling success of his first one.

However, the story is not all about Holmes and big bestsellers. What is striking about crime fiction in the 1890s and 1900s is its sheer diversity. Inspired by Conan Doyle, plenty of pipe-smoking imitations of his great detective prowled the foggy streets of London. Some were mere clones created by hack penny-a-liners to fill the pages of the proliferating magazines. Others were more substantial and original creations in themselves. Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, a lawyer turned private detective, featured in stories that were originally published, like the Sherlock Holmes adventures, in the Strand magazine. Hewitt was a much less flamboyant character than Holmes but his adventures remain well worth reading. (Morrison was also the creator of Horace Dorrington, an intriguingly amoral private detective in 1890s London who’s not even averse to trying to bump off his clients if they become troublesome.) Dr Thorndyke, the invention of R Austin Freeman, was a medical man who became a lawyer and used the knowledge he had gained in both professions to solve crimes. He made his debut in 1907 in The Red Thumb Mark, a tale that highlights the then fledgling science of fingerprints, and continued to appear in novels and short stories until 1942.

Eager to make their characters stand out from the crowd, writers sought for novel and distinguishing features with which to endow them. At the very end of the gaslight era, Ernest Bramah introduced his blind investigator Max Carrados, a man whose other senses had become preternaturally acute since he lost his sight. Thorpe Hazell, a railway obsessive and passionate vegetarian, was the unlikely hero of a series of stories by Victor Whitechurch, first collected in a volume published in 1912 entitled Thrilling Stories of the Railway and read recently on BBC Radio by Benedict Cumberbatch. Some detectives of the time had a particular attraction to the occult. William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder and Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance faced up to mostly supernatural antagonists in their investigations. Gentlemen burglars were popular on both sides of the Channel. Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law EW Hornung created Raffles, a cricketer and amateur cracksman who appeared in twenty-six short stories and one novel between 1898 and 1909; the French writer Maurice Leblanc came up with the similarly larcenous Arsène Lupin in 1905 and his adventures were rapidly translated into English.

Sleuths of all nationalities from French (Robert Barr’s Eugène Valmont) and Indian (a wise old Hindu named Kala Persad featured in stories by Headon Hill) to Canadian (the woodsman November Joe, created by Hesketh Prichard) flourished in the magazines. Women detectives were also popular. Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke who appeared in short stories in The Ludgate Monthly in 1893 and then in book form, was a resourceful employee of the Fleet Street Detective Agency; Dorcas Dene, an actress turned detective, featured in two books by George R Sims; Lady Molly of Scotland Yard was the creation of Baroness Orczy, best known for her novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the dashing hero of the French Revolution.

Many of the categories of crime fiction familiar today originated in this era. Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery, published as a serial in 1891, was the first full-length ‘locked room’ mystery; the ‘inverted detective story’, in which the murderer’s identity is known from the beginning and the interest lies in the investigative process, has its beginnings in the work of R Austin Freeman; many of Freeman’s books can also be seen as forerunners of forensic science mysteries; and the psychological thriller, which might seem an exclusively contemporary form, has its prototypes in books like Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger. Even the beginnings of the police procedural, usually dated to the years after the Second World War, can be glimpsed in Edwardian stories about police officers like B Fletcher Robinson’s Inspector Addington Peace and George R Sims’s Detective Inspector Chance.

The Gaslight Crime and Mystery Club reflects the huge variety of crime fiction from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It really was a Golden Age. In the pages of the Club’s books, readers will find all the evidence they need that there is much more to gaslight crime than just Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. There are many more riches just waiting to be discovered.

THE LODGER

A Preface by Nick Rennison

In a writing career that lasted nearly fifty years, Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote dozens of books but she is remembered, when she is remembered at all, for just one – The Lodger. In its day it was a famous novel and it has rarely been out of print since it was first published in 1913. It has been filmed no fewer than five times, once in a silent version directed by the young Alfred Hitchcock and most recently in a Hollywood version that relocated the story to present-day Los Angeles. There is something about Marie Belloc Lowndes’s tale of an elderly couple, who begin to suspect that their odd lodger may be a serial killer, which haunts the imagination. It is, in many ways, a novel rooted in the social realities of its day. It takes place in a London decades before the welfare state and the Buntings, at the beginning of the book, are teetering on the brink of real destitution. The workhouse beckons and it is little wonder that they are so grateful for the arrival of their lodger Mr Sleuth , who pays his rent without quibble and well in advance, and so unwilling later to face up to their doubts about him. They desperately need his money and what is more, he is obviously a ‘gentleman’. This is a book from an era when class distinctions were very evident and very important. Some now seem almost comic. Mrs Bunting is irritated by her husband calling the midday meal she delivers to the lodger ‘dinner’.

‘They had dinner in the middle of the day,’ she thinks, ‘but Mr Sleuth had luncheon. However odd he might be, Mrs Bunting never forgot her lodger was a gentleman.’

In other ways, The Lodger seems curiously modern and foreshadows some of the themes and motifs of contemporary crime novels. The misogynist religious monomaniac Mr Sleuth – with his ‘queer kind of fear and dislike of women’ and his mysterious ‘experiments’ in his upstairs room – is a prototype of fictional serial killers to come. Marie Belloc Lowndes’s book is no whodunnit. It is no detective story. Hundreds of such novels were published in the years before the First World War. It is rather a psychological thriller of a kind much more familiar today than in the Edwardian era. The most important relationship in the book is the one between Mr Sleuth – pathetic, lonely and yet exceedingly dangerous – and Mrs Bunting, the landlady, who is slowly forced to acknowledge to herself that she is sheltering a lunatic killer in her house. Extra tension is added to the story by the arrival of Daisy, Mr Bunting’s teenage daughter from his first marriage, who has a naïve fascination with the killings, and by the regular visits of Joe Chandler, a policeman involved in the murder case who is courting Daisy. Set in a brilliantly evoked fogbound London, and written only twenty-five years after the Jack the Ripper murders had terrorised the city in much the same way as the ‘Avenger’ murders do in the book, The Lodger remains a gripping and fascinating read.

1

Robert Bunting and

Ellen his wife sat before their dully burning, carefully banked-up fire.

The room, especially when it be known that it was part of a house standing in a grimy, if not exactly sordid, London thoroughfare, was exceptionally clean and well cared-for. A casual stranger, more particularly one of a Superior class to their own, on suddenly opening the door of that sitting room, would have thought that Mr and Mrs Bunting presented a very pleasant, cosy picture of comfortable married life. Bunting, who was leaning back in a deep leather armchair, was clean-shaven and dapper, still in appearance what he had been for many years of his life – a self-respecting manservant.

On his wife, now sitting up in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair, the marks of past servitude were less apparent; but they were there all the same – in her neat black stuff dress, and in her scrupulously clean, plain collar and cuffs. Mrs Bunting, as a single woman, had been what is known as a useful maid.

But peculiarly true of average English life is the time-worn English proverb as to appearances being deceitful. Mr and Mrs Bunting were sitting in a very nice room and in their time – how long ago it now seemed! – both husband and wife had been proud of their carefully chosen belongings. Everything in the room was strong and substantial, and each article of furniture had been bought at a well-conducted auction held in a private house.

Thus the red damask curtains which now shut out the fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road, had cost a mere song, and yet they might have been warranted to last another thirty years. A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; as, again, the armchair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire. In fact, that armchair had been an extravagance of Mrs Bunting. She had wanted her husband to be comfortable after the day’s work was done, and she had paid thirty-seven shillings for the chair. Only yesterday Bunting had tried to find a purchaser for it, but the man who had come to look at it, guessing their cruel necessities, had only offered them twelve shillings and sixpence for it; so for the present they were keeping their armchair.

But man and woman want something more than mere material comfort, much as that is valued by the Buntings of this world. So, on the walls of the sitting room, hung neatly framed if now rather faded photographs – photographs of Mr and Mrs Bunting’s various former employers, and of the pretty country houses in which they had separately lived during the long years they had spent in a not unhappy servitude.

But appearances were not only deceitful, they were more than usually deceitful with regard to these unfortunate people. In spite of their good furniture – that substantial outward sign of respectability which is the last thing which wise folk who fall into trouble try to dispose of – they were almost at the end of their tether. Already they had learnt to go hungry, and they were beginning to learn to go cold. Tobacco, the last thing the sober man foregoes among his comforts, had been given up some time ago by Bunting. And even Mrs Bunting – prim, prudent, careful woman as she was in her way – had realised what this must mean to him. So well, indeed, had she understood that some days back she had crept out and bought him a packet of Virginia.

Bunting had been touched – touched as he had not been for years by any woman’s thought and love for him. Painful tears had forced themselves into his eyes, and husband and wife had both felt in their odd, unemotional way, moved to the heart. Fortunately he never guessed – how could he have guessed, with his slow, normal, rather dull mind? – that his poor Ellen had since more than once bitterly regretted that fourpence-ha’penny, for they were now very near the soundless depths which divide those who dwell on the safe tableland of security – those, that is, who are sure of making a respectable, if not a happy, living – and the submerged multitude who, through some lack in themselves, or owing to the conditions under which our strange civilisation has become organised, struggle rudderless till they die in workhouse, hospital, or prison.

Had the Buntings been in a class lower than their own, had they belonged to the great company of human beings technically known to so many of us as the poor, there would have been friendly neighbours ready to help them, and the same would have been the case had they belonged to the class of smug, well-meaning, if unimaginative, folk whom they had spent so much of their lives in serving.

There was only one person in the world who might possibly be brought to help them. That was an aunt of Bunting’s first wife. With this woman, the widow of a man who had been well- to-do, lived Daisy, Bunting’s only child by his first wife, and during the last long two days he had been trying to make up his mind to write to the old lady, and that though he suspected that she would almost certainly retort with a cruel, sharp rebuff.

As to their few acquaintances, former fellow servants, and so on, they had gradually fallen out of touch with them. There was but one friend who often came to see them in their deep trouble. This was a young fellow named Chandler, under whose grandfather Bunting had been footman years and years ago. Joe Chandler had never gone into service; he was attached to the police; in fact not to put too fine a point upon it, young Chandler was a detective.

When they had first taken the house which had brought them, so they both thought, such bad luck, Bunting had encouraged the young chap to come often, for his tales were well worth listening to – quite exciting at times. But now poor Bunting didn’t want to hear those sort of stories – stories of people being cleverly ‘nabbed’, or stupidly allowed to escape the fate they always, from Chandler’s point of view, richly deserved.

But Joe still came very faithfully once or twice a week, so timing his calls that neither host nor hostess need press food upon him – nay, more, he had done that which showed him to have a good and feeling heart. He had offered his father’s old acquaintance a loan, and Bunting, at last, had taken 30s. Very little of that money now remained: Bunting still could jingle a few coppers in his pocket; and Mrs Bunting had 2s 9d; that and the rent they would have to pay in five weeks, was all they had left. Everything of the light, portable sort that would fetch money had been sold. Mrs Bunting had a fierce horror of the pawnshop. She had never put her feet in such a place, and she declared she never would – she would rather starve first.

But she had said nothing when there had occurred the gradual disappearance of various little possessions she knew that Bunting valued, notably of the old-fashioned gold watch chain which had been given to him after the death of his first master, a master he had nursed faithfully and kindly through a long and terrible illness. There had also vanished a twisted gold tie-pin, and a large mourning ring, both gifts of former employers.

When people are living near that deep pit which divides the secure from the insecure – when they see themselves creeping closer and closer to its dread edge – they are apt, however loquacious by nature, to fall into long silences. Bunting had always been a talker, but now he talked no more. Neither did Mrs Bunting, but then she had always been a silent woman, and that was perhaps one reason why Bunting had felt drawn to her from the very first moment he had seen her.

It had fallen out in this way. A lady had just engaged him as butler, and he had been shown, by the man whose place he was to take, into the dining room. There, to use his own expression, he had discovered Ellen Green, carefully pouring out the glass of port wine which her then mistress always drank at 11.30 every morning. And as he, the new butler, had seen her engaged in this task, as he had watched her carefully stopper the decanter and put it back into the old wine-cooler, he had said to himself, ‘That is the woman for me!’

But now her stillness, her… her dumbness, had got on the unfortunate man’s nerves. He no longer felt like going into the various little shops, close by, patronised by him in more prosperous days, and Mrs Bunting also went afield to make the slender purchases which still had to be made every day or two, if they were to be saved from actually starving to death.

Suddenly, across the stillness of the dark November evening there came the muffled sounds of hurrying feet and of loud, shrill shouting outside – boys crying the late afternoon editions of the evening papers.

Bunting turned uneasily in his chair. The giving up of a daily paper had been, after his tobacco, his bitterest deprivation. And the paper was an older habit than the tobacco, for servants are great readers of newspapers.

As the shouts came through the closed windows and the thick damask curtains, Bunting felt a sudden sense of mind hunger fall upon him.

It was a shame – a damned shame – that he shouldn’t know what was happening in the world outside! Only criminals are kept from hearing news of what is going on beyond their prison walls. And those shouts, those hoarse, sharp cries must portend that something really exciting had happened, something warranted to make a man forget for the moment his own intimate, gnawing troubles.

He got up, and going towards the nearest window strained his ears to listen. There fell on them, emerging now and again from the confused babel of hoarse shouts, the one clear word ‘Murder!’

Slowly Bunting’s brain pieced the loud, indistinct cries into some sort of connected order. Yes, that was it – ‘Horrible Murder! Murder at St Pancras!’ Bunting remembered vaguely another murder which had been committed near Pancras – that of an old lady by her servant maid. It had happened a great many years ago, but was still vividly remembered, as of special and natural interest, among the class to which he had belonged.

The newsboys – for there were more than one of them, a rather unusual thing in the Marylebone Road – were coming nearer and nearer; now they had adopted another cry, but he could not quite catch what they were crying. They were still shouting hoarsely, excitedly, but he could only hear a word or two now and then. Suddenly ‘The Avenger! The Avenger at his work again!’ broke on his ear.

During the last fortnight four very curious and brutal murders had been committed in London and within a comparatively small area.

The first had aroused no special interest – even the second had only been awarded, in the paper Bunting was still then taking in, quite a small paragraph.

Then had come the third – and with that a wave of keen excitement, for pinned to the dress of the victim – a drunken woman – had been found a three-cornered piece of paper, on which was written, in red ink, and in printed characters, the words,

‘THE AVENGER’

It was then realised, not only by those whose business it is to investigate such terrible happenings, but also by the vast world of men and women who take an intelligent interest in such sinister mysteries, that the same miscreant had committed all three crimes; and before that

Reviews for The Lodger

[charrlygirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a free Kindle ebook, written around 1913.
It's not a horror novel, by today's standards, but it is a fascinating observation about morals and class differences in that time period. It made me think more carefully about what people are willing to do or not do to be comfortable in life. It's a bit slow paced but I thought it was worth the time.

[starbox_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"You must bear with me, Mrs Bunting, if I seem a little - just a little - unlike the lodgers you have been accustomed to",, February 20, 2015This review is from: The Lodger (Paperback)This review is from: The Lodger (Paperback)Last read this aged 13, when I loved it. Re-reading it forty years later, I still find it a jolly good read.Set in foggy Victorian London, the novel opens with a married couple - the Buntings, previously servants and now reduced to a state of penury as they fail to find lodgers for their spare rooms. And then comes a knock at the door and their problems seem answered, with the arrival of prospective tenant Mr Sleuth - a gentleman, no less, who pays in advance and likes to read the Bible.But in the first few pages we realise Mr Sleuth is somewhat peculiar: a man who does experiments in his rooms and demands to be left alone. And why does he go out late at night into the foggy streets?Meanwhile London is suffering a series of Jack-the-Ripper type attacks on young women of alcoholic persuasion...Very compelling read indeed, written in 1913.

[bnielsen_30 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mr og Mrs Bunting har det hårdt økonomisk, så en logerende Mr Sleuth er velkommen, selv om han er lidt mærkelig. En af deres bekendte er ved politiet og holder dem detaljeret orienteret om en række mord begået af Hævneren. Ægteparret bliver mere og mere overbevist om at deres logerende er Hævneren, men hvad skal de gøre? Huslejepengene er jo gode nok.Udmærket bog om et moralsk dilemma

[librarygav · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anyone who has seen the old silent movie of "The Lodger" directed by Hitchcock will recognise the plot of this book. Young mysterious lodger boarding at home of elderly couple, "is he or isn't he the serial killer" (based on Jack the Ripper and set in Victorian London). Definitely worth a read, the novel focuses on the elderly couple and how much people are prepared to ignore dangerous clues when they have a rich lodger and need the money!

[reneh-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A poor couple takes a lodger into their house, at the time the town is hounted by a serial killer. The couple slowly start to wonder if their lodger is that serial killer. Are they right or not?
The tension is slowly built up and although we, readers, also suspect the lodger being the killer, we only get an answer at the end of this well-written book.

[schmerguls · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was in 8th grade and read The Album, by Mary Roberts Rinehart and thought it was so good that when my sister Colette, then just out of high school and in Omaha going to business school, asked me what I would like for my birthday I said a Mary Roberts Rinehart book. Instead she gave me this book and I read it and was enthusiastically enamored of it. The book was first published in 1913.

[encycl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An Edwardian Thriller. The Buntings, a married couple retired from service, are down on their luck. While trying to preserve their "respectability" they have sold or pawned many of their clothes and furnishings. Just in the nick of time an eccentric gentleman chooses to rent 2 rooms from them at a generous rate. At about the same time a series of gruesome murders start happening, all the work of "The Avenger" (Jack the Ripper). The story continues as Mr and Mrs Bunting begin to suspect just who they might have let in their house as a lodger.The story is well written, and atmospheric. Belloc Lowndes, the sister of Hillaire Belloc, is able to keep the suspense building until the very end. This story was recommended to Ernest Hemingway by Gertrude Stein, as he recounts in A Moveable Feast. I greatly enjoyed it.

[sigmundfraud · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes was first published in 1914 but is still relevant and intriguing today. A first-class, highly acclaimed thriller that is based on the grisly Jack the Ripper murders that occurred in Whitechapel, London twenty years before. It is a real page turner. Definitely worth a tour and available for free as an ebook at Amazon.