I’m a great reader of old books, particularly old fiction. Something I have long wanted to do is use my blog to share books I think are unjustly forgotten, or titles I think need a reassessment. (There are so many books people think they know, but have never actually read, or know only by repute.) So, welcome to an occasional series, READiscoveries, in which I share some older books I have enjoyed.
To start things off, I’m republishing this guest post I wrote for Sophie Masson’s blog, back in 2017, about a fabulous novel called The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes (sister of the better known journalist and poet, Hilaire Belloc). The Lodger is loosely based on the crimes of Jack the Ripper, but from an unusual angle–what if you suspected a serial killer was living in your house? Something I have found interesting in re-reading this review is that, in the years since I wrote it, Hallie Rubenhold’s extraordinary study of the lives and backgrounds of the Ripper victims, The Five has astonishingly come up with similar conclusions to those made here by Marie Belloc Lowndes. (If you haven’t read The Five, please do, straight away: it’s unbelievable, with all the books churned out on this subject, that someone has found a new angle, and so much information to boot.) In her study, Hallie Rubenhold persuasively argues that what ties the Ripper’s victims together is not so much prostitution (some were, most arguably weren’t prostitutes) as alcoholism. This is precisely the premise Marie Belloc Lowndes works from here—but don’t take my word for it; read the review, and then read both books and make your own mind up. (Links to buy them can be found at the bottom of the post.)
The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1913
I’d never heard of this book, or its author for that matter, but a passing reference in something else I was reading piqued my interest enough for me to download the ebook.
Mr and Mrs Bunting are at the end of their resources. Middle-aged former servants, their London lodging house has failed, and they have been reduced to surviving on furtive trips the pawnshop, when miraculously, a new lodger arrives and takes all four empty rooms in the house. Mr Sleuth is a gentleman of quiet habits, much given to Bible reading, an educated person who needs the space for his unspecified scientific “experiments”. Best of all, he pays his account regularly in gold sovereigns.
Of course, it’s all too good to be true. Mr Sleuth may be quiet, but he also has a habit of creeping out of the house in the middle of the night, and he does strange things like turning all Mrs Bunting’s chocolate box pictures of ladies to face the wall (so their eyes don’t follow him around). There is also the matter of sinister little bag he arrived with, his only luggage, which so mysteriously goes into hiding soon after his arrival, and the horrible smelling smoke he creates in the kitchen in the early hours of the morning. It doesn’t take long for the Buntings to start suspecting there may be a link between their perfect lodger, and the Avenger, perpetrator of the string of horrific murders of women that is currently terrifying London.
While Marie Belloc Lowndes has loosely based her story on the Ripper murders of a generation before, The Lodger is surprisingly bloodless. It’s a psychological parlour piece, taking place almost entirely in the claustrophobic setting of the Buntings’ sitting room, bedroom and kitchen, in which first the wife, and then the husband move from relief and delight in their good fortune to unease, concern, suspicion, fear and finally, guilt and complicity. For underlying everything is the Buntings’ own vulnerability as respectable working class people with limited resources. The failure of their lodging house has pushed them to the very brink. They’ve stared the poorhouse in the face. Where will they find themselves, if they’re revealed to have harboured a monster?
It’s easy to see why this scenario attracted a young Alfred Hitchcock; he evidently made a silent film based on the book. I remain mystified, however, that The Lodger is not better known. I sat up until the small hours reading it, and my first reaction was to wonder why, when there are books like this about, anyone would bother reading modern period crime fiction. Not only because the novel itself is so good, but because a modern author, relying on research and bringing contemporary prejudices to the exercise, could not hope to get the nuances that are so effortlessly reproduced here. For example, one can immediately see why the Buntings have failed to get lodgers, just from the description of their furniture and interior decoration. They’ve taken a house in a “better” part of town to attract a “better” class of lodger, but the ugly secondhand Victorian furniture Mrs Bunting has filled it with (both because she can afford it, and because it will last—which indeed it does, because I’ve got a houseful of it) would clearly have been a total turnoff to her prospective clientele. Then there’s the Buntings’ precarious situation. Mr Bunting was a middle aged butler who married a middle aged maid. How could a modern author possibly latch onto the fact that their options for employment are limited because positions in service for married couples are invariably for a manservant and cook?
The Lodger is available here. I hope lovers of crime fiction are tempted to give it a go; it deserves to be better known. While you’re on it, have a look at Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, as well.
