The Lodger

The Lodger, published in 1913, is Marie Belloc Lowndes's most famous novel and one of the earliest fictional treatments of Jack the Ripper. Mr. Sleuth arrives at the Buntings' boarding house — a polite, devout gentleman who keeps odd hours and has a horror of women. As a series of murders grips London, Mrs. Bunting begins to suspect the worst but finds herself paralysed between fear and financial need. Lowndes's genius is in making the reader share Mrs. Bunting's complicity — the novel is less a whodunit than a study of how ordinary people accommodate the unthinkable. Hitchcock adapted it twice.