Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
New York: Avon, 1971
Description
Fiction. Mystery. Historical Fiction. HTML: If you like your detective fiction with a strong psychological component and a continental flair, try The Lodger by Maire Belloc Lowndes. Used as the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock's early silent films, the novel is based loosely on the Jack the Ripper case, and it's sure to please discerning mystery fans who appreciate sophisticated characterization..
User reviews
LibraryThing member ErnestHemingway
“… Miss Stein loaned me The Lodger, that marvelous story of Jack the Ripper and another book about murder a place outside Paris that could only be Enghien les Bains. They were both splendid after-work books, the people credible and the action and the terror never false. They were perfect for
A Moveable Feast, pg. 27
Show More
reading after you had worked and I read all the Mrs. Belloc Lowndes that there was. But there was only so much and none as good as the first two and I never found anything as good for that empty time of day or night until the first fine Simenon books came out.” A Moveable Feast, pg. 27
Show Less
LibraryThing member nhoule
An intersting psychological twist on Jack the Ripper and his affect on two people who believe they are housing the serial killer known in the book as "The Avenger." The wife builds herself up into a mental frenzy almost from the beginning and the husband, slowly but with much more certainly towards
Show More
the end of the book. Despite their strong suspicions and ongoing muders neither one reveals their fears to each other or anyone else. At the conclusion the wife and the lodger have an incident where he provides definite proof to her fears. I enjoyed it throughout and truly liked the dialogue the author brought of the mix of londoners during that time. Show Less
LibraryThing member librarygav
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
Show More
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! Show Less
LibraryThing member encycl
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
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.
Show More
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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Schmerguls
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
Show More
and I read it and was enthusiastically enamored of it. The book was first published in 1913. Show Less
LibraryThing member ReneH
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
The tension is slowly built up and although we, readers, also suspect the lodger being the killer, we
Show More
only get an answer at the end of this well-written book. Show Less
LibraryThing member starbox
"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, 2015
This 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
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.
This 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
Show More
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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member SigmundFraud
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
Show More
worth a tour and available for free as an ebook at Amazon. Show Less
LibraryThing member Charrlygirl
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
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
Show More
bit slow paced but I thought it was worth the time. Show Less
LibraryThing member electrascaife
Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, after years of working in service, put their savings into running a lodging house. But things haven’t worked out as profitably as they’d like, and they find themselves very near to starvation when one day the perfect lodger knocks on their door. He wants to rent out all
Inspired by the theory that Jack the Ripper was himself a lodger of this kind, the story does a great job of exploring the gamut of emotions and thoughts and fears that someone in Mrs. Bunting’s position might experience. Lowndes strikes a nice balance of good story and eerie atmosphere as well.
Show More
the rooms – he claims he needs peace and quiet for his work – and pays a large sum up front. At first the Buntings are ecstatic, but their eccentric lodger’s arrival in their lives coincides with the beginning of a string of murders near their London neighborhood, and Mrs. Bunting begins to suspect that it may not be a coincidence at all. Inspired by the theory that Jack the Ripper was himself a lodger of this kind, the story does a great job of exploring the gamut of emotions and thoughts and fears that someone in Mrs. Bunting’s position might experience. Lowndes strikes a nice balance of good story and eerie atmosphere as well.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Eyejaybee
I remember being amazed a few years ago when, in a random discussion about books with my best friend, I made a remark about Hilaire Belloc (basically saying that while he may be best known for his Cautionary Tales poems, he had been a prolific writer including spy novels, history books and some
Having been put in my place for such an egregious attempt at mansplaining, I had to confess that my knowledge of the literary Bellocs was fairly limited, and mostly stemmed from Jonathan Raban’s discussions of Hilaire’ s The Cruise of The Nona within his own book Coasting. Such was my ignorance that I hadn’t realised that Belloc’s sister marie had also been a prolific and celebrated novelist. In fact, she wrote several immensely popular crime novels in the first two decades of the twentieth century, including a few that featured her own sleuth, Hercules-Popeau who first appeared at around the same time as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
The Lodger follows the travails of the Buntings, a couple who had previously been employed as butler and maid in a succession of established households. Now fallen on hard times, they are poverty-stricken and wondering how they will be able to afford their next monthly rent. They had previously sublet a large part of the property near Marylebone that they are leasing, but currently have no tenant, and little prospect of finding one before their own rent falls due.
However, they are suddenly visited by a retiring and mysterious stranger (with the odd name of Mr Sleuth) who seems to be looking for exactly what they have to offer. He also seems to have decent financial resources, because he pays several weeks in advance, allowing the Buntings to start to dream of a measure of financial security, in the short term at least. In the meantime, newspaper reports about a series of brutal murders of young women abound.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I began reading this, and was prepared to be fairly ruthless if the book proved to be at all tedious. There was, however, no worry there at all – the story grabbed me right from the opening paragraphs, and I really couldn’t put it down.
Marie Belloc Lowndes doesn’t indulge in minute developments of her characters, although all of the figures are completely believable. Mr Bunting is a laconic character, slightly obsessed with the lurid accounts of crime in general, and the current series of murders in particular, while his wife is more reserved. Mrs Lowndes’s account of the murders is clearly inspired by the Whitechapel killings attributed to Jack the Ripper, but she carefully avoids any hint of glorifying such awful crimes. Although the newspapers in her novel revel in the sense of terror, the reader is not offered any details at all. I thought the depiction of the response of different elements of London society to the killings was captured very acutely.
The novel was a huge success when first published in 1913, and various film adaptations have been made, include an early silent movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I will certainly be delving further into the works of Marie Belloc Lowndes.
Show More
accounts of his sea travels). She replied with the stunning throwaway remark, ‘You don’t need to tell me anything about him – he was my great great-grandfather.’Having been put in my place for such an egregious attempt at mansplaining, I had to confess that my knowledge of the literary Bellocs was fairly limited, and mostly stemmed from Jonathan Raban’s discussions of Hilaire’ s The Cruise of The Nona within his own book Coasting. Such was my ignorance that I hadn’t realised that Belloc’s sister marie had also been a prolific and celebrated novelist. In fact, she wrote several immensely popular crime novels in the first two decades of the twentieth century, including a few that featured her own sleuth, Hercules-Popeau who first appeared at around the same time as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
The Lodger follows the travails of the Buntings, a couple who had previously been employed as butler and maid in a succession of established households. Now fallen on hard times, they are poverty-stricken and wondering how they will be able to afford their next monthly rent. They had previously sublet a large part of the property near Marylebone that they are leasing, but currently have no tenant, and little prospect of finding one before their own rent falls due.
However, they are suddenly visited by a retiring and mysterious stranger (with the odd name of Mr Sleuth) who seems to be looking for exactly what they have to offer. He also seems to have decent financial resources, because he pays several weeks in advance, allowing the Buntings to start to dream of a measure of financial security, in the short term at least. In the meantime, newspaper reports about a series of brutal murders of young women abound.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I began reading this, and was prepared to be fairly ruthless if the book proved to be at all tedious. There was, however, no worry there at all – the story grabbed me right from the opening paragraphs, and I really couldn’t put it down.
Marie Belloc Lowndes doesn’t indulge in minute developments of her characters, although all of the figures are completely believable. Mr Bunting is a laconic character, slightly obsessed with the lurid accounts of crime in general, and the current series of murders in particular, while his wife is more reserved. Mrs Lowndes’s account of the murders is clearly inspired by the Whitechapel killings attributed to Jack the Ripper, but she carefully avoids any hint of glorifying such awful crimes. Although the newspapers in her novel revel in the sense of terror, the reader is not offered any details at all. I thought the depiction of the response of different elements of London society to the killings was captured very acutely.
The novel was a huge success when first published in 1913, and various film adaptations have been made, include an early silent movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I will certainly be delving further into the works of Marie Belloc Lowndes.
Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Haycraft Queen Cornerstones (1913)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1913
Physical description
256 p.; 18 cm