There’s a famous quote by Alfred Hitchcock, about how (paraphrasing) a bomb going off in a scene with no buildup is surprise, while watching the buildup to a bomb going off, knowing there is a bomb about to go off, is suspense. I’ve been reading a bunch of Marie Belloc Lowndes lately, and it seems safe to say that Hilaire Belloc’s sister was a suspense writer, when she wasn’t writing flat-out soap opera. Her best-known novel is The Lodger,(1) which is available for free on Gutenberg or very cheaply on Amazon (basically you’re paying to spare yourself the hassle of getting the book into kindle by yourself).

Essentially, this is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting,(2) a former butler and his very prim second wife, who have gone into business for themselves, subletting rooms in their rental house with the understanding that they will feed the lodgers and clean up after them etc. Business has been bad, and the husband, a true-crime buff, has been distracting himself by following the exploits of a Ripper-like serial killer called the Avenger, who seems to specialize in killing formerly respectable women who’ve gone off the skids due to alcoholism(3). A young policeman acquaintance keeps Mr. Bunting supplied with all the latest news on the case, including some tidbits that he really should keep to himself. By the merest of accidents, Mrs. Bunting ends up being the one who answers the door when a gaunt, nervous gentleman shows up asking for lodgings.

For reasons I can’t get into without practically drawing you a floor plan, he’s willing to pay generously to basically take all the rooms they’ve got, but he’s also specific about his wants: no valeting, no meat dishes, no interaction until he rings the bell for their services. He also has weird habits, like reading aloud all the parts of the Bible which denounce the perfidy of women,(4) and going out after midnight in soft-soled shoes, only to return a few hours later.

Mr. Sleuth,(5) the Lodger – fragile, neurotic, apologetic – is reputedly a mashup of the appearance and mannerisms of the poisoner Dr. Thomas Cream with psyche profiles(6) of Jack the Ripper that were fashionable at the time of the Ripper murders. What he suggested to me was mostly an early 1970s Peter Cushing character: take the religious mania and misogyny of Gustav Weil from Twins of Evil, spread the brittle courtesy and insistent demands of Mr. Smith from Asylum on top of that, and then sprinkle it all with a healthy dose of the actor’s real life tendency to fret and apologize, and you have Mr. Sleuth the Lodger.

However, the Lodger is merely a maguffin, to use another Hitchcockism. The is mostly a psychological study of how Mrs. Bunting becomes eaten up with guilt over the possibility that this paying guest, who represents a huge windfall for her family, is a serial killer and she ought to report him to the police. I’ll be honest: I found this book interesting as a social document(7), and Lowndes’s fevered, urgent prose has a way of sucking me in, but the story didn’t work for me on a couple of levels.

First and foremost, is that Mrs. Bunting, who comes off as quite a nice lady seen through her husband’s eyes in the opening pages, spends the rest of the book as a nagging, judgmental jerk. Secondly, she can’t prove anything about the Lodger for most of the book. The worst thing she knows about him is that he burns his own clothes after one of his late night outings. The worst thing her husband finds out about the Lodger (late in the book) is that he comes back in once with blood on his coat, for which the Lodger has a ready, though lame, explanation. Innocent until proven guilty, people! Too much of the novel feels like the Buntings doing the right thing – squashing their natural busybody instincts – for understandable if not particularly noble reasons (they need the money), and the moral dilemma Lowndes was trying to set up didn’t really work for me.

The ending strongly implies that the Lodger is the Avenger, with a VIP identifying him as the man associated with some very similar killing sprees in two other cities, and a brief scene from the Lodger’s POV describing himself as “an absolutely sane man with a great avenging work to do in the world.” It’s hinted that he ditches his murder gear, suicides in some way that doesn’t leave a body behind,(8) and the Buntings donate to charity the money he left behind in his lodgings. But I find myself want to argue with the banality of that conclusion. What if…the Lodger was a convenient patsy for the previous killing sprees? What if this is all a conspiracy to protect a more powerful and even less sane man? Is it a lifetime of reading too much Agatha Christie that makes me approach this novel this way, or would Lowndes’s original readers have felt this way too? Some of Lowndes’s other books make me feel like this was one of the authors Christie was reacting to or playing off of, but that’s a subject for another time.

(1) Ironically, the silent film version of The Lodger by Hitchcock supposedly goes for more of a murder mystery approach, making the title character a sympathetic red herring and another character the murderer. This was done for commercial reasons, and does not necessarily reflect Hitchcock’s judgment.

(2) Their surname may remind you of Lord Peter Wimsey’s valet and factotum, Bunter.

(3) I seem to recall that some of the actual Ripper victims were women who had started out as respectable working-class, but had come down in the world due to suboptimal lifestyle choices, so possibly that was where Lowndes gets this part from.

(4) As opposed to the even more numerous passages dealing with the perfidy of men.

(5) Can we talk about what an act of false advertising it is to name a crazy guy and possible murderer, who does exactly zero detective work, Mr. Sleuth? Because I feel like it is one. It doesn’t even rise to the level of irony, it’s just an annoying misnomer.

(6) Yes, profilers go back that far, and yes, even then, they were as useless as piglet-nursing anatomy on a boar.

(7) I had for instance no idea that the stereotypical Victorian/Edwardian urban landlady was possibly a renter herself, subletting the rooms to her lodgers.

(8) To me it looks like he might have upped stakes and started killing in yet a fourth city, but maybe the fact that nothing bad happens to the landlady – whom he believes betrayed him to his enemies – is supposed to mean that he’s dead.